Not much of what I write is planned in advance; I just follow where the pen takes me. The “silent type” with the chainsaw at the beginning of this story had shown up before in writing that didn’t lead anywhere; I didn’t know what to do with him. This time, I found his opposite, and that ended up giving shape to the piece. The second-person point of view was there from the beginning of this effort; it seemed to drive the writing in a way.
I’m drawn to work by writers like Amy Hempel, whose stories are often very short and don’t always follow “the rules” about structure—at least not that I can see. So I find myself wondering, what is a story? Even when I reached what seemed to be the end of this piece after several revisions, I had no idea whether it was a story.