The writer of fiction must recognize that there are limits to the choices available to him. Conventions, in some cases established by the practice of writers over many centuries, have lead to the development of expectation on the part of readers. The writers must take these conventions and expectation into account. He must decide to what extent he is willing to follow conventions. He must decide which of the reader expectation are relevant to the story he is writing. And he may decide that he is justified in violating the reader's expectation for the sake of some higher purpose
What have the choices facing the writer to do with the experience of the reader of fiction? I suggest that the best way to develop a full awareness of what going on in any story you may read is to develop an awareness of the choices the author has made, the choices that have given the story its distinctive shape. This includes, of course an awareness of the alternatives open to the author. Your purpose is not to determine why the author made these choices often he is not sure himself, but rather to discover how the author's choices have combined to produces the unified story you have before you.
It is natural to think of the author's series of choices as beginning with the choice of subject. In fact, however, the writer may not begin by thinking in terms of subject at all. A chance remark, a fleeting insight into character a striking image- any of these may be the true origin of a story. Such matter are, however, more relevant to the author's biography or to a study of the creative process than to the analysis of a particular story. If the writer does not always begin with a subject, the reader is inclined to begin by wondering what the story is about, which is one way of saying what the subject is. And this is surely a question (again, perhaps not consciously asked) that the writer must answer early in the process of writing his story
