The courses I teach are of roughly three kinds: creative writing “workshops” at the graduate level (for here at OSU we offer an MFA in Creative Writing, a highly competitive graduate program to which we admit just twelve or thirteen new students each year, who will leave us three years later with their first books in hand—a novel, a collection of short stories or poems or essays); the advanced undergraduate workshops, for undergrads who are quite serious about writing (and who must apply, with a sample of their work, to get into these classes), but are not as accomplished as our graduate students (and most of whom will not in fact go on to “become” writers; indeed, this course is often what changes their minds about that dreamy plan); and, finally, the introductory classes in creative writing, which are very popular elective courses.

It is this last kind of creative writing class that most fascinates me, for it is a class that can change a student’s life. I have taught two dozen sections of it over the years, and I have been course director for it—supervising our MFA student teaching associates who teach sections of it each year. There is nothing quite like in anywhere in the Academy, because there is no other college course in which a student is asked to take the events, experiences, characters, and emotions that have constituted her own life so far and make art of it.

This is not why the course is so popular, however. Most of the kids who turn up on the first day are nervous and excited because they want to try their hands at being Stephen King. They are crestfallen when I announce that they are forbidden to use as templates for their stories anything they have read by anyone else—or seen in a movie or on TV. That the core of the short stories they write must be their own: that it is their own lives that I’d like them to plunder. I explain that for literature to work it must seem real. And that it is difficult enough to find a precise way to say something, a way to say it that captures exactly what something is like in “real life,” if one is working with some event or feeling or person one knows. If they instead try to recreate something they’ve seen at a distance—no matter how frequently—they will be guaranteed failure at this. One cannot put words on paper to make something seem real if it has never been real to the writer.

For the first couple of weeks, I get complaints. “My life is so boring. There’s nothing in it that would make a good story, even if changed practically everything.” I refuse to believe them. No one’s life is boring to oneself, I suggest. Aren’t you just afraid that other people will find it boring? Everyone’s afraid that deep down, secretly, people find them dull. But a life, every life, is full of texture, full of surprises. It doesn’t matter if you’ve grown up “in a boring suburb” (or a boring small town, or a boring midsized city in the boring middle of the country), or that you weren’t abducted by space aliens or have never witness a grisly murder. Well, I mean, really, it does matter. How fortunate you are!

And the fact is, no matter how ordinary things may look on the surface of them, we all know that nothing in one’s own life feels ordinary. And why is that? Because we experience the things we experience so deeply! Because they are ours and ours alone. Two people may have utterly alike experiences—on the surface of it. But no two people ever see or feel things in exactly the same way. It is that vision, that experience of feeling—“the experience of the experience”—that makes a story live. Makes it sing.

Some of these students, it will turn out, are actually interested in learning to write. Some imagine they might want to be writers; most are voracious readers and simply want to try their hand at something that has meant a great deal to them. One or two will have been “the best writer” in her small town high school class. And one or two may well be able to write very well indeed, though not necessarily the ones identified in the previous sentence. Many of the students I see in these classes are not English majors; many are upperclassmen from very distant disciplines. Many have no idea what they’re doing in my classroom: an instinct, a vague feeling, led them there.

I want to do right by all of them.

To this end, I take everything they do seriously, with the hope that they will, too. More often than not this “trick” works. My classes usually start out thinking that I'm crazy: my relentless questions about what they've written (Why would this character do this? But why did he think he did it? What’s the story he tells himself about it? How is that different from what the reader will think? From what you think? And how did he feel when he did it? How will he feel later? What do you think will become of him ten years after this story is over?) startle and sometimes infuriate them. But in the end—long before the end—they are thinking this way too, asking each other (and themselves) these very same questions: treating each other like “real” writers. This will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for almost all of them and I mean to make the most of it.

They will learn, in the course of things, how writers think, how writers work, how to read stories as writers, and how to make judgments about writing. But most important, by the end of the ten-week quarter, they have learned something about making lucid to others their own ideas about the world, as well as something about what their ideas about the world are—not to mention something about how to write an elegant sentence, and something about the way literary art is made (that it doesn’t fall from the sky! That real humans are engaged every day in making the books they love).

But I have a secret agenda, too, and that is that I know for a fact that the experience of making a coherent narrative of the events that have made up their lives—the events, the resulting emotions, the changes within them—will make their lives better. And that is always my goal, however lofty, however absurd-sounding: to improve—to change—my students’ lives.

It’s why I write, after all. To change lives. And if I do a good enough job teaching my students something about writing, then I find that reading the stories they write changes my life. That’s when I know I have succeeded. When I, like a character in a good story, have changed, however slightly. I am always grateful to my students for keeping me in motion.