tomorrow's lesson: Writing meets Yoga

Every time I go to yoga class, which I do maybe 4-5 times per week, my teachers stress the contrary actions necessary to do a yoga asana or pose. The front of the arm turns in toward the face, while the back of the arm turns outward, for example. The word "yoga" itself is said to mean "yoking," tying these opposites together into a balanced whole.
I would submit, along with the Structuralists, who rode the hobbyhorse of unified opposites almost to eternity, that writing is also a matter of yoking opposites. Writing a narrative is a matter of telling a story that moves forward relentlessly in time. However, that is not all there is to it, as badly written, plot-heavy narratives will testify. If it were, just having a juicy story to tell at the water cooler would be sufficient and we wouldn't need literature or writers. But it's the way someone tells a story that matters, the words that person chooses, the details she hangs the story on. Description delays the forward action of a narrative, making the reader stop smack in the middle of a sentence while the writer inspects in a loving, leisurely way the interior of the fridge from which the character takes his slightly flat bottle of Sam Addams, or the scuffed finish of the maple living room suite, circa 1975, with its homely plaid sofa. And without it, no one would care how the story ends.
Today I visited my friend Reb's literary blog, The Mark on the Wall, http://themarkonthewall.blogspot.com/ ,which linked me to a lecture in which a writer named Ron Carlson who teaches at UCI dissected a hunk of a story he had written for an audience of aspiring writers in UCI's MFA program, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. It was fascinating because it emphasized the process I describe above: the writer has a story in mind, or a piece of a story, an incident, but he has to build the setting, the context for this story, as a jewelry maker designs the setting for a precious stone. And he does it, as it were, in the dark, having no real idea where he is going with this. In fact, part of the reason he perseveres in the process, which is often fruitless and frustrating and frequently thankless, is that he is simply curious to see where it goes, to learn what tricks his own mind has in store for him.
In my experience, which mostly involves poetry, writing is not quite like this. I might have one image or a particular rhthym stuck in my head, and mostly there is description, but not necessarily narrative, though it can and does happen too. Or I might have a feeling, and nothing else. Maybe that is the difference between fiction and poetry? Who knows.