I am a writer because I never had a teacher who said, “Write what you know.” If I had been limited to writing what I knew I would have produced in these 38 years one unpublishable haiku. I don’t write what I know. I write what I can find out. Fiction is based on research. If Ernest Hemingway really had fought all those wars and bulls, if he really had climbed all those mountains and caught all those fish, if he really had loved all of those women , he wouldn’t have had time to write.

What teachers need to impress upon kids is that a story is always about something that never happened to the author. We don’t live it first and then write it down. Fiction isn’t real life with the names changed. The characters in our novels are not exact human beings we put down on the page. We put them together from parts, and a story isn’t what happened, it’s what ought to have happened. It’s an alternate reality. But teachers cannot get away from this idea that we are writing our personal stories and that our students will become writers if they write their personal stories. I wouldn’t have written my personal story if a teacher told me to do it. I was a boy. I needed a lot of privacy. I didn’t write about relationships and emotions.

My teachers were emphasizing research. Footnotes. Looking stuff up. Writing the well-organized essay—and the shape of the essay—became the shape of the novel for me. And so I am a writer because of teachers who did not encourage self-expression. A novel—writing—is not self-expression, it’s communication. You’re not telling your story, you’re telling the reader his.

Post Transcribed From Audio 6/17/09.