Teaching Fiction: Craft, Composition Theory, and a Lie
by Luke Daly
[pdf version here: Daly-TeachingFiction]
[see the companion creative pieces here: “The Four Deaths of Mitchell Fish“]
My first magic trick as a new lecturer of creative writing was reappearing three days per week. I disappeared too, at the end of every class, but the students didn’t seem to impart this with the same mystique.
“Daly!” sometimes they would shout, or I would imagine them shouting, as I entered. In my younger life, I was always running, always late, so I may have encouraged them to see this as a magical act. And then I’d say, “Today we’re going to talk about Point of View,” or something like that. And we would. Not only would we talk about it: identify it, discuss its concealing and revealing qualities in selected works, practice it during writing heuristics, and in general start to build it into our lexicon, but the students would come to class having read the right chapter from Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. Or maybe that day it was the chapter on character. By all accounts, they would be ready to wring every drop out of Character into their own writing. But this was not the slam dunk case, as many educators will understand. One goal of this essay is to discuss why this gap occurs and how to work through it.
