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Richard Powers
 Thoughts on Teaching Writing:
Fiction can travel anywhere, and probably should. Each time out, the writer must become a whole new county courthouse of competing voices, oblique motives, and incompatible beliefs. As such, no single set of rules will serve to get us through even the simplest story. No invariant algorithm is ever going to point our way. Every good story teaches us the rules it is after.
A class in narrative is like any good story: people trapped inside different worlds, bumping up against each other, losing their balance, making choices, suffering the consequences, moving forward, and asking one another: What happens next? No class can teach those choices. But we can learn to read our own narrative technique—from diction and syntax, through focal position, all the way up to scene and structure—and study the effects those decisions produce in different readers. We can learn to see when our tools are pulling apart and discover new ways of making them pull together in the service of a story’s flow. Richard Powers is the author of eight novels. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award (for Operation Wandering Soul, 1993) and three times a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novel Gain (1998) was awarded the James Fennimore Cooper Prize from the American Society of Historians and his most recent book, Plowing the Dark (2000) received the Vursell Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Time Magazine named his Gold Bug Variations the best novel of 1991. Powers is a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His most recent novel is The Time of Our Singing (2003).
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