January 24, 2003

The Dream, and the Reality, of Writing Fiction

By FERN KUPFER

My friend David tells me that he's not writing any more scholarly articles; he's actually begun a novel. Like me, he is an academic. He teaches philosophy at a pretty good liberal-arts college on the East Coast. I teach creative writing at a pretty good land-grant university in the Midwest. We both have tenure. We had to publish, lest we perish. And publish we did.

Now David says he finds philosophical scholarship boring. "I'm really excited about this novel, though," he tells