JK ROWLING AS DETECTIVE AUTHOR. Posting this to remind myself that these principles don’t only apply to detective stories. Things that matter to the climax of the story need to appear earlier, rather than coming from out of nowhere. (That’s one of the many kinds of problem with “Kissable Pictures.”) Also, I tend to write rough drafts very intuitively, and then go back and see which intuited moments or images were actually advancing the point of the story and which ones were superfluous or distracting. Thinking about this relationship between the end and the beginning of the story, where elements that appeared earlier are crucial to the resolution of the plot, is helping me figure out some things that will happen in the big finale (“and then they exploded”) of “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent.”