Who hasn’t ben through the ghastly experience of sitting in front of a blank page, with its toothless mouth grinning at you: Go ahead, let’s see you lay a finger on me?

A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant. Rember Chekhov’s Gurov in The Lady with the dog? Gurov beckons to the little dog, wagging his finger at it over and over again, until the lady says, blushing, “He doesn’t bite,” whereupon Gurov asks her permission to give the dog a bone. Both Gurov and Chekhov have now been given a thread to go by; the flirtation begins and the story takes off.