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How do you come up with stories. Well you take some ordinary thing and you heighten an element of it. You look at your watch and you think what if a man owned five watches and what kind of a man would he be. Or you can go the other way and negate some element, you say this man owns no watches and avoids knowing the time at all costs and what kind of a man is he now. This is all very simple.

What is only slightly more difficult is to write the story. I say only slightly more difficult because one thing will lead to another and of course you have permission to follow it. This man avoids knowing the time because he remembers the exact time when his wife died and well why would that be, because he always had to know the time because of a very exacting childhood. Why was his childhood so exacting. You get the idea. Things become fact or unfact the moment you think or unthink them, for the purpose of framing the story at least and this process is still very pleasant.

Well what is the really tough going then. The cutting is the tough going. I do not mean the red pen work. Yes the mechanical work is tiresome, most evenings will be mechanical in the end but prose is a craft like any other. You learn that if you place a comma here it will mean that the watchless man is thinking slowly and if you use the word happy instead of joyous his thinking will be quite simple. Slowly you assemble this effect that the watchless man was a logical and observant child and in this flashback he is trying to figure out what his father wanted of him, which is something that children do, and after awhile this effect has been accomplished well enough so you move on. This is not the tough going.

What is the tough going is cutting out everything that is not true. This is hard because firstly you need to know what is true and secondly because under no circumstances can you ever say it. What is true in the real world is dull and turgid in fiction. If somebody wanted to read the true tale of their father they would write his biography themselves. But even this constraint is bearable. The real thorn of it all is that you also must not tell merest lies. You must not write that the watchless man’s father wears a green tie if in truth he would wear red or that he loved his son when he did not. You must not do so because fiction does not exist without real characters. Anything could happen next to characters that are not true. This is fantasy. Not fiction.

Your job as a writer is to tell only the truth using only lies and so you must write the watchless man’s father very carefully and in a way that says something true about our fathers. The only way to do this is to write everything possible about him and then remove what isn’t true. So you remove that he was equally exacting as his son, because he wasn’t, and that there was anything very clear or pivotal that made his son exacting, because such things are never clear. You cut out that his own father wore a watch or left one in his will; these things never happened. That they were earlier essential to your tale is entirely besides the point. If there is no inner truth to them—if they are critical to the story but not to the human condition—then from the story they must go.

So you cut and cut and eventually you realise that what you absolutely cannot bear to cut is that the watchless man’s father never made enough time for him. Under no circumstances will you take that away. Under no circumstances could you take it away even if you tried because this is what the watchless man’s father truly is: he is a man who did not make time. And now because you know that this is true, other things reveal their truth also. How the watchless man grew obsessed with the time not given to him. How he fussed over the precise minute that his future wife was to meet him for their date, the exact hour at which she was to serve dinner. A wall calendar filled out a whole year in advance. The evening hours allocated just for him and her. For the children they were sure to have. For the children they will not.

See his watchface frozen, still completely as the moment of her death goes on forever. See his anguish. His clutchings at nothing that frighten the nurse. See all the time he had for her and them, set aside until eternity—a gray and heavy void that he now hurtles through alone. A crib is slept next to and kept. The calendar expires. Is not replaced.

All these things are true because the watchless man is true. He is true because you wrote him. He is true because you are him. He is true because who we are is more imagination than not, because we live things that do not happen or have not happened yet. What is true is not what is real but what is important. The really tough going is realising what is important. It is realising that we knew what was important all along.

Somewhere—somewhere burningly and eternally true—a chronometer is removed from a wrist and set atop a pillow.