MC:  With a story, the goal is to craft something that mimics the consciousness’s grasp of existence, something invisible, as a memory is invisible, has no physical existence, and yet can be so powerful. A memory always has a feeling attached to it, a charge. Narrative’s task is to render events as lived, including the feeling and the judgment of the event, that "charge." I am speaking here of the ideal of story, even before it is born in language. I guess I would go with E. M. Forster, or at least with the wisdom I always attribute to him, as to what a story is. An anecdote is a rendering of a series of events, of course, in time and space. A story, which contains an anecdote but is more, describes not only the life in time but, as well, the “life by values." ( Forster’s term) Kabbalists say that events are to be designated to be located, so to speak, with reference to ten directions in the space-time continuum: up-down, north-south, east-west, before-after, and distance or nearness to chaos or order (or good or evil). All successful stories end on a note that in some sense informs the reader about the judgment of the events in the narrator’s view, or sets things up so the reader makes her judgment, applies her values---there is not only event, there is event plus the feeling about the event, the worth. A story is an anecdote “located” in a cosmological sense. We know what happened, where and when and what order, and we know if it was nearer to chaos or to order, if the teller found it to be good, bad, or neutral, what the teller felt it really meant, what was significant about it.