With Cathal, I thought about it being a sunny morning and how he would make himself go to the office that day, which should have been his wedding day, because he didn’t want to lose out on his pay. In this case, I knew what was ailing my character, why he was so agitated. I’ve taught creative writing for half my life-and structure is what I keep coming back to, what I rely on to save me when I get into trouble out there. The writer is always looking for someone who’s genuinely ailing or finding it difficult to cope, someone who is out in the deep water. So I started out with July 29th, because it was the date when Lady Diana married, and that worked well, because the story could aptly begin with the hot, unwanted sun shining, in Cathal’s point of view.

For years, I taught using this example, until one day a student asked if I had written the story-and I realized that I had better sit down and write it before someone else did. And that his going to work and coming home were full of tension and loss because of what was not happening. I didn’t really know what I was doing in that lesson or where it would lead, but, when I got to the documentary and his sadness, I realized that I was describing this man’s wedding day-the day he was supposed to be married. One of my students asked if I could come up with an example of a tense story with little or no drama. I invented the story of a clerk who goes to the office, leaves after nothing much has happened, then takes the bus back home to an empty house, where he can’t find the cat, then finds the cat and eats a frozen meal, then watches a documentary about Lady Diana getting married and cries silently while watching. Well, it’s an odd one, this. The story came to me while I was discussing the differences between drama and tension (which are sometimes near-opposites to me) in a fiction-writing workshop. Did you have this structure in mind when you started writing? Your story “ So Late in the Day” unfolds like a mystery, beginning on what seems to be a normal workday for its main character, Cathal, but turns out to be something quite different.

Small things like these book review