A reader asks why nothing ever happens in my stories

A reader wrote to me, very politely, to say that she enjoys my stories but that nothing ever happens in them. Then she corrected herself. That was not quite it, she said. Things do happen. A man misses the last bus. Two neighbours fold washing on a shared landing and argue about whose line it is. The tide comes in. But they are never, she said, the things a story is supposed to be about. Where, she wanted to know, is the story?

I have been carrying the question around since, mostly on the coast road at the hour I like best, before the heat, when the sea is the colour of weak tea and the first lorries are coming down from the north with ice for the market.

Here is the honest answer. I think the big things, the ones she means, a death, a wedding, a fortune made or lost, are rare. Most of us get only a handful in a whole life, and when they come we are usually too frightened or too happy to notice anything about them except that they are happening. They make poor material. They are too loud. They drown out everything around them, and everything around them is where people actually live.

What I write about instead is the ninety nine days out of a hundred. The uncle at the jetty who has sold the same fish from the same blue crate for forty years and greets each customer as though the day has only just become worth living now that they have arrived. The woman who buys one mango, chooses it for a full minute, and walks home holding it like a small warm animal. The boy on the sea wall at dusk who is clearly waiting for someone and is clearly going to be disappointed, and who you will never see again, and whose whole evening you have somehow been handed for free.

Nothing happens in that, I suppose, if by happen you mean the plot turns. But something is happening the entire time. A life is being lived at the exact weight it is lived at, and most of that weight is in the small things, because that is where almost all of it is kept.

I think we are trained out of this. We are taught that a story is a machine for getting from a beginning to an ending, and that everything in the middle is there to move us along. So we learn to skim our own days the way we skim a dull chapter, waiting for the part that matters, and we are forever surprised, near the end, to find that the part that mattered was the skimming.

So I write slowly and small on purpose. I want to give a reader back the thing the big stories take away, which is the ability to sit at a kopi stall and notice that the light has changed, that the man two tables over has stopped pretending to read his paper, that the sea has gone quiet in the particular way it does just before the rain.

Where is the story, she asked. I would say it was in her letter. A woman read some small quiet pages, felt that something was missing, could not name it, and sat down to write to a stranger about it. That is a whole person, caught in motion. If I could put that on a page exactly as it happened, I would never need a plot again.

Nothing much happens in Durian Season either, if you do not count the waiting. You do not pick a durian, you wait for it, and the waiting is as much the season as the eating.