By Roger Rosenblatt

I have a good feeling about this class. I'm going to like them. Liking a class is more practically useful than it sounds. In a likable class, discussions are freer, more open. When the students like one another, they take everyone's work more seriously. In another class I taught, after a woman read a section of her novel aloud, another woman asked, "May I be your friend?" The first woman answered, "You already are." The students will also feel safe with one another and will trust the group with personal information they use in their writing.

In my novel-writing workshop, a student wrote about a woman who was taking care of her husband, whose mind was deteriorating. She too was deteriorating from the effort. She told her story as a novel, but the students understood it was her own. They respect such disclosures. They unite with one another like a noisy brood of brothers and sisters. And they can always unite against me.

Sometimes they protect one another. One of the first things teachers learn to look for in students' writing is the subject of suicide. A student in that same novel-writing workshop ended his book with the hero walking into the ocean after having slit his wrists with seashells. A woman in the class came to my office hours to say she was concerned about the suicide ending. Did I think something was troubling the student? I talked to him after class, and he seemed fine. But the impressive thing was his fellow student's alertness, which stemmed from affection. Writing programs do not actively promote such careful attentiveness, but the fact that every life counts is built into the work we do. I think the students pick up on this.

This year's group comes from very different backgrounds, and its members are widely diverse in experiences and in ages. All this should make them more interesting to one another. I remind them that they compose the only audience of readers they need worry about for the present. They will read one another's work and comment on it. I want them to know, "You'll never have a situation like this again. Writing is a lonely enterprise. Here, in these classes, you have colleagues, people who share everything with you and wish you well." I urge them to be severe and exacting in their comments. "I'll never let you be harsh, though I doubt you ever would be. And I promise: In all my years of teaching, I've never had to referee a fistfight."

This is a half-lie. Some years ago I had a really good student writer, a kid from the streets, who was built like a frozen roast and rode to class on a Harley. He could not take criticism, and fought with me over every correction I made in his work, beyond the point of reason. Years later he sent me a letter allowing that I may have been right about a thing or two. But there was one class meeting when things got so hot between us, we nearly came to blows, which would have been bad news for me.

Jasmine, age 22, grew up in Babylon, Long Island, went to Stony Brook as an undergraduate, and by her own admission, has had no experience in anything. Her mother is from St. Lucia, her father from Hempstead, N.Y.

Inur's family, originally from Uzbekistan, settled in Pakistan, then emigrated here. She is 24, Muslim, beautiful, and a terrible reader of her own work. Every sentence turns up in a Valley Girl question. I kid her about this without mercy, but it doesn't help.

Kristie, who also grew up on Long Island, plays the flute and has worked at a farm stand. At 22, she still looks like a sweet and gawky schoolgirl. She bubbles with life, asks questions unremittingly, and describes herself, inaccurately, as my biggest pain in the ass. Kristie, Inur, and Jasmine are very tight. After the "Modern Poetry" course last year on the Stony Brook main campus, the three of them followed me to Southampton. I ask them what I did wrong. They gang up on me whenever there's an opening.

Suzanne, in her early 60s, is slim, with a narrow face engulfed in flaming red hair. She was reared in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, in a neighborhood of Quonset huts, and still has Brooklyn in her voice. Born to a nonreligious Irish family, she became a practicing Roman Catholic on her own.

Her husband, George, 59, has the body of a pro-football nose tackle, his girth held in check by his 6-foot-2 height. He dresses in black. George grew up in a German Catholic community. A year and a half ago, while tracing his lineage, he learned his family was Jewish. In the 1930s, they had converted for self-protection. "Of course we're Jewish," relatives told him casually at a family gathering. "Everyone knows that!"

Sven, 33, was reared by his mother, an Austrian. His father, from Norway, died when Sven was 2. Sven is reserved and solid, the sort of guy you want on your side. After graduating from the Air Force Academy, he spent five years as a pilot, flying C-17 cargo planes into Iraq and Afghanistan. As a kid he studied art.

Ana, 71, is petite, with short, dark hair and dancing eyes. She was born in London and reared in Argentina, before her family moved here. Her father was a U.N. diplomat. She speaks with an aristocratic intonation, but is no snob. She went to Smith College.

And there is 54-year-old Robert, who is blue-collar handsome, like Dana Andrews. His solemn expression accompanies a quiet wit and a sardonic sense of humor. His family is rooted in Long Island, though now he makes his home in Manhattan with his girlfriend and their 9-year-old son, and commutes to the two restaurants he owns. He has worked in the business since leaving Queens College, and writes articles on golf on the side.

And Diana, 23, who was a varsity gymnast at SUNY Cortland. Bright-eyed, with black hair and a clear, clipped way of speaking, she is everyone's pesky, adorable kid sister. She is five feet tall and boasts that she can high-jump 4 feet 8 inches. She is working on her first novel, begun with me last term.

And Nina, 57, small and graying, with a lovely, scholarly look. She went to Bucknell, got her master's in library science at NYU, and became a librarian. Her mother was Swiss. Her father, Italian, was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner. She took care of her parents at the end of their lives. Nina is what John Steinbeck calls an "inside-herself woman." In the "Modern Poetry" class, she wrote a brilliant paper on Seamus Heaney in the form of a parody of a Heaney poem.

And Veronique, 43, who went to American University and is a former photojournalist for the New York Post. Her parents came here from France and she grew up speaking French. She has French eyes, mixing wisdom and anxiety. Her fellow students know her to be gracious and kind.

And Donna, 49, efficient, with a pretty and purposeful face, who majored in philosophy at Stony Brook and got her degree while her three children were growing up. As a young woman, she worked for Izod and Ralph Lauren. She sketches and gardens. She wants to write essays on the environment. Her husband sells golf balls.

Who among them will turn out to be the better writers? Who will have a voice like no other's, an original stance, a different way of apprehending the world? Who will have the patience and stamina, the seriousness of purpose, to make the most of his or her gifts? Who will recognize that writing is hard labor, work?

When I started teaching writing courses, in my 20s, as the Briggs-Copeland Instructor at Harvard, there were students in my class whose successful futures seemed assured because they had both talent and will. Frank Rich, Mark Helprin—I hardly taught them as much as I stood back and cheered. Yet there was one young woman, the daughter of a federal judge, who was better than the lot of them, born with perfect pitch of language and the quiet authority of Anne Tyler. Like Tyler, too, she had something to say. Yet, for whatever reasons, she did not want to be a writer. Writing was just something she did well. Years after she studied with me, I bumped into her in a supermarket in Cambridge. "Did you keep up the writing?" I asked her. She shook her head without apology. "You were my most talented student," I said. She smiled and shrugged.

So here we go again—another writing class, like tens of thousands occurring around the country. While programs in English literature have withered in the last 25 years, because of a useless competition of various critical approaches, and also probably an exhaustion of the material, writing programs have burgeoned. Since 1975 the number of creative-writing programs has increased 800 percent. It is amazing. The economy has tanked. Publishing favors nonfiction. Young people seem to prefer the image to the word.

Yet all over America, students ranging in age from their early 20s to their 80s hunker down at seminar tables in Iowa, California, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, and hundreds of other places, avid to join a profession that practically guarantees them rejection, poverty, and failure. All who have taught in our program—Jules Feiffer, Billy Collins, Meg Wolitzer, Robert Reeves, Ursula Hegi, Marsha Norman, the late Frank McCourt, Lou Ann Walker, Patty Marx, Melissa Bank, Matt Klam, Kaylie Jones, Julie Sheehan, David Rakoff, and others—dutifully remind the students of their likely fate, but they come to us in hordes anyway.

I look around the table at my dozen hopefuls, a Chorus Line without a star to support—smart, good-natured, talented people who yearn to forge a life from their imaginations. Writing students look different from other students. No matter how old they are, they have a childish romanticism to them, as do professional writers—sometimes self-destructive, but also touching. Ana, sophisticated as she is, has the face of a young girl about to take in her first Broadway play. George, big as he is, looks like a puppy eager for approval. They all want the world of writing so very much—not only to succeed in it, but to be part of it, to stroll in it and feel it wrap around them.

I admire their brash impracticality and wonder if, in some way, their reckless enthusiasm for art, conceived and nurtured in an increasingly money-driven age, represents their unconscious protest against the age. I never heard my students say such a thing, or indicate in any way that they thought themselves heroic for beating oars against the tide. If anything, they make a show of bemoaning the lovely madness of their desire. Yet there are so many of them—the continuing multiplication of all the nation's writing programs—that I can't help thinking that something deliberate and stubborn lies behind their decision to make artists of themselves. They turn to the power of their powerlessness, not unlike Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Ludvík Vaculík, and the other writers of the Eastern Bloc who had nothing but words to rebel with.

Can I teach them to become professional writers? No. Can I teach them to write better than they do? Yes.

"We will do short stories first," I tell them. "Then essays and poems."

"Any reason you're beginning with the short story?" asks George.

"Stories are central to life. They're everywhere: in the law, where a prosecutor tells one story and the defense tells another, and the jury decides which it prefers. The only reason O.J. Simpson got off in his murder trial was that the jury preferred Johnnie Cochran's story to Marcia Clark's. In medicine, a patient tells a doctor the story of his ailment, how he felt on this day or that, and the doctor tells the patient the story of the therapy, how he will feel this day and that, until, one hopes, the story will have a happy ending. Politics? He who tells the best story wins, be it Pol Pot or FDR. The myths of businesses. The foundations of religions—the 'greatest story ever told.' Everything you write here is a story. Short stories tell stories, of course, yet so do essays and poems.

"An essay is the story of an idea or of a true event; a poem the story of a feeling.

"We start with the story because it is basic to human nature. It's like a biological fact, an inborn insistence. In the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jews knew what was going to happen to them. They had seen their mothers and neighbors hauled off to the extermination camps, and were themselves dying of diphtheria and hunger. And yet they had the strength and the will to take scraps of paper on which they wrote poems, fragments of autobiography, political tracts, journal entries. And they rolled those scraps into small scrolls and slipped the scrolls into the crevices of the ghetto walls. Why? Why did they bother? With no news of the outer world available to them, they assumed the subhumans of the so-called master race had inherited the earth. If their scraps of paper were discovered, the victors would laugh at them, read and laugh, and tear them up. So why expose their writing, their souls, to derision? Because they had to do it. They had a story to tell. They had to tell a story."

I tell them about Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle, who suffered so massive a stroke that the only part of his body he could move was his left eyelid. Yet with that eyelid, he signaled the alphabet. And with that alphabet, he wrote an autobiography, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And about the skipper of the mackerel schooner in The Perfect Storm, who wrote a message by lantern light as his ship was going down. And about the messenger in the Book of Job, who had a story to tell. And about Melville's Ishmael, who alone was left to tell the tale.

"We like to distinguish ourselves from other animals by saying we're a rational species. That is sort of a commonly shared joke. But a narrative species? That, one can prove."

They are beginning to wonder why I am spending so much time on this subject. "And yet, if stories lie at the center of experience, indispensable to our being, there still must be those people responsible for telling them, those self-elected few who are the chief storytellers, and keep the race alive and kicking. And do you know who those people are?"

They stare at me, surprised. Someone asks, "Us?"

Roger Rosenblatt is a writer and professor of English and writing at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. This essay is excerpted from his most recent book, "Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing," just published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.