Last week, as a prelude to an event called 72 Hours, the Hugo House checked three authors—T. M. McNally, Sherman Alexie, and Pam Houston—into the W Hotel for three days with unlimited room service and no other obligations except to write. In a swanky party before the sequestering (the miniature burgers on tiny pieces of toast were sloppy but delicious; the desiccated apple slices with cheese were just plain weird), the writers were given guidelines for their stories:

The Theme: Do Not Disturb
The Ingredients:
1. A character trait: giggles when angry
2. A location: a flooded basement
3. A plot point: a phone call from an ex-lover
4. A line of dialogue: "Are we there yet?"
5. A rhetorical element: metaphor con- taining "cafeteria"

The event was unofficially dubbed an Iron Chef for Writers. Alexie, who is quite possibly the most openly competitive writer on earth, announced that the ingredients were "too easy." Houston stood alone in a corner and kept staring at the piece of paper with the ingredients, as though her story was somehow already written there in very light pen strokes. McNally disappeared.

Three days later, the authors emerged at Hugo House to read their new works. Houston folded the ingredients seamlessly into her in-progress road-trip novel about a woman named Pam. The audience laughed mightily (Pam starts dating a rocket scientist and wearily concedes, "At least this one will be good for some metaphors").

Alexie read four poems. Frankly, this kind of felt like cheating—inserting five disparate elements into a suite of poems is much easier than weaving them into one coherent narrative—but they were really good poems, about accidents and ex-lovers and death. Before one poem, Alexie admitted, "When I get competitive, I write about my dad's death." After the room was done cracking up at the unvarnished horror of his honesty, he blew everyone away with a poem about heartbreak and loss and clitorises.

But the winner of the unofficial competition had to be McNally, who read a precise, imaginative, endlessly surprising account of an alcoholic ex-priest discovering his own father's extramarital affair. ("Even in 1972, or especially, it was possible for a love affair to change a man's life.") He equated Pluto, both the planet and the god, with the distant black keys on a piano, and he successfully compared a hospital to an aircraft carrier. It was a devastating, fully formed story that still had the heart to make everyone laugh with offhanded observations of a "penis-headed 747." This time, the underdog took it in a walk.