About This Story

Last night I was reading The Plague, a novel published in 1947 by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, when I came across a passage that had a strange resonance:

To some, these events will seem quite natural; to others, all but incredible. But, obviously, a narrator cannot take account of these differences of outlook. His business is only to say: "This is what happened," when he knows that it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace, and that there are thousands of eyewitnesses who can appraise in their hearts the truth of what he writes.

In any case the narrator (whose identity will be made known in due course) would have little claim to competence for a task like this, had not chance put him in the way of gathering much information, and had he not been, by the force of things, closely involved in all that he proposes to narrate. This is his justification for playing the part of a historian. Naturally, a historian, even an amateur, always has data, personal or at second hand, to guide him. The present narrator has three kinds of data: first, what he saw himself; secondly, the accounts of other eyewitnesses (thanks to the part he played, he was enabled to learn their personal impressions from all those figuring in this chronicle); and, lastly, documents that subsequently came into his hands.

This seems like an odd preface to a fictional story. Nevertheless, the narrator has a point. The richest and most reliable stories draw from all three wells: what you experienced, what others told you they experienced, and what what written before.

I've written more than one story that had only two -- or even one -- of those elements. I'm afraid it was evident to the reader.