Teaching students to craft a world that never was

I’m writing from my Intro to Creative Writing class.

We’re all gathered under an oak tree at Arkansas Tech. The weather is beautiful. Fall is in the air. I have six of my favorite novels and short-story collections in my backpack. Sticky notes rise from the pages, marking passages I plan to share with the class.

The students don’t know it yet, but I’m about to ask them to write a 199-word story. “Story” isn’t exactly the right term. What they pen will serve as the opening to a longer prose piece they’ll write over the course of the semester. I want them to start small. I want them to focus on every word.

I also want them to have an idea of what I’m looking for, which is why I brought examples along. The first book I pull from my backpack is “The Name of the Nearest River,” stories by a dear friend and downright dazzling author, Alex Taylor.

The cover features a shirtless man with a scraggly beard holding up a lunker catfish. There’s no pole in sight. No stink bait. It appears as if the guy has pulled the beast straight from the river with his bare hands, which, if you’re familiar with Alex’s characters, isn’t all that surprising.

I explain to my class everything I just explained to you, and then I open the book to the story, “The Evening Part of Daylight.” The first line reads:

“It was Lustus Sheetmire’s wedding day and he’d just punched his new bride Loreesa in the jaw.”

I was planning to read more, but that’s as far as I make it before one of my students says, “Wait. This guy’s your friend?”

A hush falls over the outdoor class. A lawnmower starts up in the distance. It takes me a second, but then I understand the implication. This student thinks Alex Taylor, the author of the story, has once punched his soon-to-be bride in the jaw. Which, as I can faithfully attest, is not the case.

Maybe it’s the redneck dude and

the giant catfish on the cover. Maybe that’s what made my student jump to such a conclusion. Or maybe it goes deeper than that.

As an author who has had to answer my fair share of audience questions, I tend to go with the latter. Most people think you are your fiction, but that isn’t always true.

You see, we writers — and most other humans too — all have this thing called a brain, an imagination, which allows us to pull whole worlds and vibrant, sometimes violent characters out of thin air.

As the class wears on, I do my best to express these thoughts to my students. They need to understand how to separate the creator from the creation more than they need the examples I’ve lugged along.

A lively conversation ensues, a class-wide chat about how people — young people, especially — consume their art. It’s different from how I do it, that’s for sure. They’re more mindful of the author as a person than they are of the author as a craftsman who creates a world that never was out of a world that was and is.

And that’s OK. Knowledge is power. Heck, in this day and time, it takes some doing to remain blissfully ignorant.

But before I turn back to Alex’s opening paragraph, I

let the cat out of the bag. I tell my students that they’ll soon be asked to write a story of their own, pages that we’ll all be reading and discussing in class.

Their smiling faces grow suddenly somber. That lawnmower from before is louder now, closer.

I let the tension build for a few more whirring seconds, then assure them I know just how they feel, along with everyone else who has ever created something and set it loose in the world.

Eli Cranor is the nationally bestselling, Edgar-Award-winning author of “Don’t Know Tough” and “Ozark Dogs. ”He can be reached using the “Contact” page at elicranor.com and found on X (formerly Twitter) @elicranor.