Narrative is mystery. In Volume 10, each of the writers latches onto that truth. In the moment between thinking and setting down the words, that crucial gap between imagining and inhabiting a world opens before us. It’s not a stretch to say that there is no more mysterious force than storytelling—the thing that, as Olivia Laing puts it, exists “between the transcendent and the practical.” Is narrative, as Laing posits, the importance of noting down the minute details? What characters eat, what they wear, how they greet each other? She considers writing to be a sort of domination: “The page isn’t resisting me.” Or is it cadence and repetition, as Lynne Tillman suggests? Particularly fascinating: Tillman’s assertion that “people think you know your characters, but you can be as unknowing of them as a reader. It’s just you, in some sense. You’re creating something with words.”

And what of the bones of narrative practice—of discipline? The act of returning to writing day after day, even when it’s the last thing we want to do? A career is also a narrative, and these writers take us far and wide—from Olivia Laing’s time as a climate activist, to Samuel R. Delany’s forays into magazine writing during the emergence of pornography, and to Garrett Bradley’s marriage of film and fiction.

These writers play with structure, repetition, and narrative movement: principles that become the walls of the homes they construct for us as readers. But there is no single way forward in the development of story, just as there is no finite interpretation when a work has entered the world. While Delany leans towards “leaving the feeling out” of his writing so that the conditions of the character’s life appear unmitigated by emotional affect, Ben Lerner points to the urgency of “registering the emotional pressures of an utterance…a mimesis of a voice made up of many voices.”

In this collection of interviews, these thinkers dare us to fully immerse in the work and decide for ourselves what to keep. When I began reviewing the conversations in this volume, I noticed the immediate slipperiness with which each writer, to a person, evades answering questions definitively about meaning-making. Vivian Gornick comments on the crucial, ever-increasing overlap between fiction and memoir. In Gornick’s estimation, “the novel was the prize and the celebrated form of high literary culture forever…so they keep calling essentially nonfiction, fiction.” Dennis Cooper sees his life as a “resource” for his work, but never an end in itself. There’s a shared celebration of books written in previous eras, too. Gornick acknowledges contemporary fiction writers’ tendencies toward “emotional disconnect,” but doesn’t resonate with it. Brandon Taylor bears witness to the creation of this “affectless” voice as novelist, writing instructor, and editor, and yet finds himself drawn to Edith Wharton, Marie NDiaye, Jamaica Kincaid, and the architecture of the family saga. If we’re to term narrative as an elusive act, we consistently find ourselves witnesses to a present moment without clear action.

These writers, in their patient refusals to share critical secrets, push readers to explore what their narratives mean to us. For Brandon Taylor and Lorrie Moore, the classroom is top of mind, as both writers prioritize the exchange of knowledge with their students. Moore admits to learning about the world of the Internet—a narrative entirely unto itself—through her pupils, while Brandon employs the classroom as an opportunity to overhaul the prevailing fantasy of the writing workshop.

Doreen St. Felix foregrounds the topic of celebrity and its place in culture—she ponders that “celebrity has become less sealed—it’s not necessarily a reflection of uniqueness now.” Instead, it’s “more interested in relatability.” What, then, becomes of the narrative of fame? The precipitous rise of an individual who was once “able to do something no one else could”? For St. Felix, fame evinces diminishing returns as a vehicle for criticism. She notes that, when she first began writing, she never considered her work as criticism until it was published; now, she finds herself fascinated with the critic as an essential figure “who moves around and is kind of crude and makes things interesting.”

And what of storytelling as a product of loneliness or unhappiness? Gornick recalls moments in her life when “solitude, which was a pleasure, turns to loneliness, which was a punishment.” And Gaitskill seeks out loneliness in her work, both as a part inherent to its structure and as a condition of its making, which, along with music, has been foundational to her writing. Rachel Kushner, whose characters undergo profoundly challenging and occasionally brutal experiences, finds an “unsexy” but useful word to describe the narrative act: engagement. “It’s like I have gained access to an interior world, and sometimes an exterior world,” she says of the moment of contact with the page. “Orders start coming down, orders that allow me to see and render the world.”

It’s been the promise of November to acknowledge and clarify the parts of the wheel that turn when these “orders” come down to the canvas, the page, the screen. Our interviews are narratives of their own, of course—each one an opportunity to peer into someone’s “interior world,” to take a look around at the design, the corners, the way the light enters. It is a privilege to experience these micro-atmospheres, these planets and all that falls into their orbits. The qualities Kushner gives her characters are “private mysteries.” Above all, she says,

“writing is produced by profound doubt. At the same time, as you move through the world, there are little glimpses and insights—you see things that only you are seeing, you know things that only you know. A work of art produced through language is an accretion of those moments, a context for them.”

It’s our hope that these interviews can each function as their own insight, their own glimpse into the hand that hovers above the page in the split second when it’s not clear which path we are set to travel. If reading is the only way through the mystery of story, listening is our vehicle for collecting the pieces of wisdom these writers share—about craft, discipline, chance. For me, the preservation of this mystery has emerged as possibly the most important tenet of storytelling. Even when pressed, these creators don’t give—they shift, offering us another object to examine; or they distract us, prolonging our wait for answers just enough for us to think of our own questions at new angles. There remain no certain formulas for success and no single authority—even the writer herself—on the devices they employ (with or without realizing they are doing so). The wisdom of this cohort is most stunningly evident in moments of uncertainty or questioning. To arrive at the point of definitive knowing, they promise, is to arrive at a dead end, or to know nothing at all.

Try as we might, they will never let us fully arrive, and thank goodness for that.