SOURCE: "A Problem in Fiction," The Pacific Spectator, Vol. 3, No. 4, Autumn, 1949, pp. 368-75.

In the following essay, Stegner recreates the experience of writing "The Women on the Wall, " describing how the story came to him and how he developed the plot.

There are so many kinds of stories that one cannot hope, by analyzing or re-creating one, to say anything very definitive about the form. One kind, intensely personal in feeling, deriving often from memory, its origins clouded and obscured by time, its methods so unconscious and undeliberate that the story seems to grow by itself out of some fecund darkness, can reward analysis only if the analysis searches out the whole mental and emotional state of the author during composition, and becomes a kind of personality analysis, a study in Jungian terms of the creative process and the creative personality. Another kind, built deliberately according to predetermined...