“Storytelling has much to do with the experience of opening an old shoe box or a sandwich bag full of polaroids and building a narrative out of the bits and pieces that have been left behind,” writes Carlos Fonseca at FSG Work in Progress about the process of writing his novel Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. This week open a drawer, closet, or old shoe box and search through miscellaneous objects. Then, write a story inspired by the narrative that builds slowly as you browse through the fragments of a makeshift archive. How does each piece of the puzzle reveal a tiny bit more of the big picture? Is the entire picture ever really completely realized or knowable?
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