To ask for a map is to say, Tell me a story.

The books [and games] that give us the most pleasure combine uncertainty and satisfaction, tension and release.

The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in.

Most writers I know move back and forth between the rational and the intuitive, though there are some who approach writing very rationally, and others who claim not to think their work through.