A riddle about writing fiction

 I ran across one of Claire Keegan’s koans about writing fiction: 

A short story begins after what happens happens.

 

In the way of koans, I ran across one possible meaning before running across the koan. The illumination arrived with the Story of the Week from Library of America. This is from one of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, “Now I Lay Me.”

 

I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I

would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a

boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing

very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the

deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching

trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon

to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; some-

times on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch

very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate. 

 

The story begins after what happened. What happened was that a soldier was wounded. The story is about what he does when he can’t sleep.

• Source: Ernest Hemingway story “Now I Lay Me” is available at Library of America’s Story of the Week site:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/07/now-i-lay-me.html