One of the things I found most difficult to teach to beginning writers in my creative writing classes at Texas A&M was the fact that any piece of fictional prose begins in the ordinary, literal world and proceeds to dismantle that reality to reveal a dream world lying just beneath. Facts are everything at a university, which embodies the powerful tenets of 18^th empiricism, in which imagination plays no part. Facts are the unimpeachable building blocks of “truth,” the basis for understanding the world. Nothing that is not visible, or tangible, can be said to exist. Everything in a student’s life needs to be verified by logic and precedent. If a student is asked to undermine the appearance of the ordinary moment, it is a bit like asking someone in the Middle Ages to entertain a possible heresy as a writing assignment. You will never quite get the student to do what you asked – the facts will accumulate and the oddities the student is forced to introduce are easily explained away by the reigning doctrine. You end up without a story. You can’t quite explain why such writing fails to achieve story-ness.  Continue reading →