Welty on the Writer’s Eye

It is not from criticism but from this world that stories come in the beginning; their origins are living reference plain to the writer’s eye, even though to his eye alone. The writer’s mind and heart, where all this exterior is continually becoming something–the moral, the passionate, the poetic, hence the shaping idea–can’t be mapped and plotted.

–Eudora Alice Welty, The Eye of the Story p. 109 (1979)