It seems to me now thatThe Story Is Truehas its genesis in a question John Coetzee asked one evening after dinner about twenty-five years ago. The three of us had spent much of the evening catching up and talking about politics (John and Diane had shared an office in the University at Buffalo English Department for a year in the early 1970s, when she first came to Buffalo and just before he returned to South Africa).

It was well after midnight and we’d moved on to talking about writing. John’s third novel,Waiting for the Barbarians, had been...

What I said at the end of the previous chapter has to do with stories that are fixed in form, that are always there in all essential regards whenever you want to encounter them. There is, however, another kind of story in which nothing is necessarily fixed. These are stories that themselves change with those very factors I just said change our reactions to fixed stories: the moment, the company, the condition, and the mood. They’re the stories we tell one another; they’re our personal stories.

Stories that we tell one another vary in detail and emotional rendering, and sometimes...

When I was a graduate student, I drove Stephen Spender to the Indianapolis airport from Indiana University at Bloomington, where he had given a reading. I had read some of Spender’s poetry, but I knew little about him other than that he was a famous and highly respected poet. Spender talked about several things during that sixty-minute drive, but what I most remember him talking about was the Spanish Civil War.

Two of my college teachers at Rutgers had fought in it. I remember one of those teachers in particular—John O. McCormick—who, whenever he could, referred to it...

A story is not the sequence of events only; it is also the specific words with which that sequence is given utterance and the way in which those words are uttered. The plot is only part of the story. I think I first became aware of this when I tried to deal with a conversation I had in 1964 in the ward for terminally ill convicts on the top floor of the old state prison hospital in Huntsville, Texas.

A dying old man named Pete McKenzie told me that many years earlier he had received a death sentence. I asked...

Remember Pete McKenzie? He’s the man in the Texas prison hospital who said, “[T]he situation developed to such an extent where there was a gunfight and the gunfight put wounds in my legs and I started shooting after I had been shot….A chief of detectives was killed.” I want to spend a little more time with that use of the passive voice (“It is thought that”) and intransitive (“The plate fell”) as an avoidance device. With the passive, something happens but nobody’s doing it; with the intransitive, something happens but the verb has no consequences. It’s a major narrative element,...

I wrote earlier about the way politicians use stories. I want to tell you about one politician and one story in particular.

New York Senator Charles (or “Chuck” as he prefers to be called) Schumer is a relentless performer at college and university commencements. During the May graduation season, he traverses New York State appearing on stages as an announced part of the program or turning up as a surprise visitor. Some days he’ll catch multiple commencements, like a dog hitting every tree and hydrant. He made two commencement stops in Buffalo in May 2006. The first, on May 6...

When storytellers are telling stories, they’re active, fit for description: they’re talking, fluttering their hands, moving about. Their listeners aren’t so easy. With few exceptions, a storyteller can get to them only after the narrative moment is over, by which point they are themselves telling a story about an event in which they were among the listeners.

But there is no story—told, written, filmed, sung, or otherwise performed—without story listening, seeing, or reading. Every fiction writer, alone in a room, posits a reader or hearer. That, as Primo Levi says, is part of the fiction writer’s art: the...

I’ve said several times now that stories are devices we use to make sense of things, or they’re the verbal objects that articulate the sense we’ve made of them. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Not all stories make complete sense, and some stories don’t make any sense at all.

Many years ago I got roped into being the adviser for an M.A. student whose thesis was a novel. I don’t teach writing, and I didn’t want to do this one, but her novel was about police and gangsters and the head of the writing program asked me...

A few evenings after O. J. Simpson was arrested for the murders of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, a waiter at the Mezzaluna Restaurant in Brentwood, California, my wife Diane and I had dinner with our friends Bruno Freschi and Vaune Ainsworth at Just Pasta, a restaurant on Buffalo’s West Side. Like nearly everyone else around here that summer, we talked about the murders and the preliminary hearing on probable cause, which was just beginning. O. J. had played for the Buffalo Bills in the seventies, and he was still a local hero. A lot...

Perhaps the key legend in twentieth-century-popular culture in the United States is the one about Bob Dylan being booed throughout much of his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The performance and audience response, many cultural historians have argued, stands out as the pivotal moment in the shift from the folk revival to rock. The events described in the legend never happened, but in popular culture, as in political campaigns and jury trials, facts matter far less than the perception of facts, and the course of events matters far less than the narrative of events.

Before I can tell...

In late August 1972, my son Michael, then ten years old, and I were in a junk store near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The owner pointed to an old pistol in a locked glass case. He said it had once belonged to Billy the Kid, whose grave was nearby. I said that if Billy had owned half the guns people said he owned, he couldn’t have climbed onto a horse. “Don’t know about that,” the man said, “but I do know that Billy owned that gun.”

Michael stared at the pistol. Clearly, he believed it was Billy’s, and he was...

The key problem every storyteller must solve—whether it be someone telling a story at a family gathering, a novelist, a filmmaker, a lawyer in summation, or any other narrator—is finding the correct voice for the narrative. The matter of voice and the matter of story are not separable: the story exists in the voice in which it is told; without that voice you have only someone talking about a story, not someone performing or telling one. It is perhaps the most important and the least understood aspect of the storyteller’s art. What wouldThe Sound and the Fury...

Violence is the name we give to things that disrupt or negate or dissolve or abrogate order. One way we contend with violence is on its own terms, with more violence: you hit me, I hit you; the evil land baron brings in a hired gun dressed in black, the farmer brings in Shane dressed in fringed buckskin; unknown malefactors attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the United States invades Afghanistan, whose government seemed to have something to do with that attack, and Iraq, whose government did not have anything to do with that attack. It’s not...

And then there are those killers of men whose violence leaves not a corpse behind, who tell everything they know and are finally guilty of nothing at all. How can they get away with it? Let me tell you about one of them, a man I call Jim Bennett because there is no point telling you his real name.

My friend Lydia Fish called one fine autumn day and asked, “Are you still working on that book about oral histories from the Vietnam War?” I told her that I’d left the project for a while to do other things and...

Warren called from California, gloomy and grim. He’d just finished dinner with an old friend, a man in his nineties, who had always been vigorous, optimistic, involved in projects, dapper, full of stories. Now there were food stains on the Turnbull and Asher shirt, and the projects, optimism, and vigor were gone. “All he’s got are those stories,” Warren said. “His life now is composed of those stories in the past. Without those stories… .”

And I thought: That’s what death is. Death is the place where there is no future, no story being spun out in imagination. Because the...