You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John UpdikeThe essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John UpdikeWhy does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?
John UpdikeDream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
John Updike