Nick Paley

“Can a story have an impossible event in it? Sure. Say we’re at a dinner party in a story and the host’s head suddenly pops off, hits the ceiling, then lands in his soup. Allowed? Of course. What readerly expectations does it raise? That the writer noticed it and will now cause the story to notice it. (If no one else at the table notices, we feel this lack of acknowledgment as an oversight on the writer’s part, i.e., bad writing.) There is also the assumption that the rest of the story will take the event into account (someone else’s head will pop off, or the host will be shown sobbing in his bed that night, full of shame, obsessively checking his head/neck juncture). That is, as we’ve said, the meaning of a story in which something impossible happens is not that the thing happened (it’s only language, after all, with somebody at the other end of it, making it up) but in the way the story reacts to the impossibility. That is how the story tells us what it believes.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain