Undefined parameters

The question of newness is always one with which my students (and even I) struggle. How to we bring something new into the world when everything has already been said? I watch them resort to complicated plot lines and pseudo-exotic settings and characters. They have to fumble through these attempts to see how they fail. Experience is the best teacher, and, being young, they haven’t yet received much of an education on that front.

So how to reach something genuine, true, exquisite in the mundane? I wish I could tell them, offer advice, but I think a writer must be true to herself before she can be true on the page, and this is where it gets difficult. How can we be true to ourselves if we haven’t yet learned who we are? Maybe it’s better to say we must be true to the struggle to be ourselves.