Forbidden things you can do anyway

I've been having kind of an amusing exchange with a friend on facebook, a fellow teacher, who presently is grappling with inexperienced writers' mistakes.  She has been citing the mistakes, and then I have been firing back with examples of really good fiction that uses the "mistake" to greater ends.  For instance, to "it was all a dream" I countered David Foster Wallace's "Oblivion."  "Everyone dies in a car accident at the end" reminded me of Charles Baxter's "Saul And Patsy Are Getting Comfortable In Michigan" (although he did bring them back to life in a later story and novel).  And when my friend complained that her students don't even know to start a new paragraph for dialogue from a new speaker, I threw down Stephen Dixon's Interstate.

Of course my friend is right: there are things that are almost impossible to do well, and other things that a beginner can wrap his head around more easily, and learn to do skillfully, in the three-and-a-half-month confines of an academic semester.  But wow, it's hard to know how to tell them what's right and what's wrong.  "Some writers have been able to use this technique effectively," you can say, "but it isn't working in your story."  Or, "Traditionally, dialogue is formatted this way.  You can format it another way, but you need to know the convention, and understand the consequences of breaking it."

If you ever wonder why creative writing classes often seem to be graded rather generously, this is the reason.  Everything is a gray area.  Nothing can be judged out of context.  There are no things you can't do, and there are no things that always work.  There are only...things.  An infinite number.  And they can be arranged in an infinite number of ways.  It's enough to make me think my job might actually be...difficult.

Well--let's go with "complicated."

Twilight

August is, despite its brightness, the 3 am of the year. Most everyone is in some kind of sleep, occupational sleep, summer sleep, cultural sleep. I'm teaching a summer class on the short story to high school students, but mostly they just want to talk about Stephanie Meyer's Twilight books. They no longer want to talk about Harry Potter, although they're all experts and scholars on the subject--they're like old academics who could, if forced to, lecture for months about deconstruction or structuralism, but have moved on. No, they want to talk about Twilight, and do so with a weird gleam in their eyes and giddy catches in their voices.

Meanwhile I place these short stories before them, and they turn out to have read many of them before, though when asked about them, they get key details wrong, or switched around. It doesn't bother them. Bartelby the Scrivener is suddenly down for whatever, and Sonny in Sonny's Blues is now a guitar player who meets the devil at the crossroads.

But if a student gets a detail of Twilight wrong, or even right, an enormous quarrel begins and won't end until someone is sullen.

Me, I hate a vampire story. And I'm tired of superhero movies.

"And I confess I find it hard/ speaking to people/ who are fond of outer space," wrote the poet Stephen Dunn in "Turning Forty."

But who am I to complain. In high school I read mostly Stephen King and Ayn Rand because nobody was around to suggest anything different, and my own taste was too slow in developing to warn me away.

Where does that turn happen, away from crap to works of real value?