Anthony Doerr writes that her “prose […] is always trending away from straightforward clarity toward something more interesting.” In a commentary on the care required to balance this clarity with more figurative language, the narrator of Alcott’s story “Natural Light,” a professor of creative writing, wondershow close a simile should get to the character’s actual life and circumstances: in comparing her inner sadness to the color of her dress, weren’t we depriving the reader of some useful speculative distance?Alcott’s method relies heavily on primary research.