A writing critic reviews the construction of Charles Chesnutt’s stories and how to write surfiction.

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.

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

A writer wakes up every day hoping each day would be the day he finally manages to write, though each day he finds new reasons to delay his writing.

Searching for a muse to inspire a novel he is attempting to write, an author in San Francisco finds his passions ignited by something much more sinister.

In the depths of his mind, a writer tries to uncover the autonomous, nefarious motivations of his own characters.

A young couple obsessed with syntax sets off to meet their favorite author.

After being recruited for a so-called neurological study, man meditates on the imaginary city he sees in his dreams.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

In California, a young woman reflects on her relationship to her father while working on a novel. Through reading her father’s novel, she understands their relationship through his eyes.