A rejected author ponders his writing abilities and lonely existence as he experiences his monotonous daily life. After one of his stories is rejected yet again, he receives a mysterious letter regarding the unpublished story that offers new hope.

A creative writing teacher sits through a conference with one his favorite students. He takes us on a journey through the characters in the story, and in his life.

In an unlikely encounter, a homeless teenage boy recounts harsh events of his life to a writer. He nonchalantly tells of an employer whose assignments caused him to have permanent physical and mental damage.

A writer struggles to craft a story and begins to lose his own sanity when an idea finally comes to him.

A mentally-ill, suicidal man writes letters to different people about prominent memories in his life from his birth onwards—some nostalgic, some thankful, some apologetic, and some confessional.

A man walks with a writer around London who tells him about the novel he wrote that was lost which can never be matched in beauty by any other.

A writer arrives at an eerie residency near a lake where she camped with her Girl Scout troop as a child. The writer revisits a past trauma at the hands of the other Girl Scouts and comes to conclusions about what it is to reside in one's own mind. Along the way, she navigates a mysterious illness, a fellow resident whose identity and words are impossible to remember, and the appearance of a severed rabbit on her doorstep.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

Stinging from his recently cut-off engagement, a young man retreats to a small town in the mountains of Virginia to work as city editor of the local newspaper. Alternately entranced and disgusted with his hermit-like nocturnal life, he finds peace and pleasure listening to the St. Anthony Chorale.