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One of the oddest things I've noticed in my creative writing classes is that students tend to do much better with writing exercises than they do with work they originate themselves. For example, tell someone to write a fifty word story using words of only one syllable and you'll get genius. Ask someone to write a story on anything at all, and it's a little more hit or miss.

Why is that?

I don't know, though I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. Perhaps exercises blast writers out of ingrained thought patterns; they force us to be original. Or perhaps writing exercises are fun and they remind us that writing should be joyful (and reading too!) For whatever reason, writing exercises play an important part in a fiction class, which is why I included ten of them in my novel. My hope was that readers might feel inclined to do some of them, just for the fun of it.

One of my favorite exercises in the novel is one I came up with after my youngest son took part in a local play. There happened to be a young man in the cast who had been a member of a famous boys' band, and I was fascinated by that kid. There was something so charismatic about him; he literally glowed from within when he was on stage. Maybe that's why they call them stars.

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Whenever I hear the expression, "Write what you know," I always wish I knew something more exciting. For example, one of my creative writing students used to be a stripper and I've always envied her. How could you write a boring novel about stripping? (You probably could-but it would take some effort.)

For better or worse, the things I know are decidedly less salacious: how to be a mother, daughter, wife, teacher-and this last was one of the important experiences I drew on when writing my novel. I've been teaching creative writing for Gotham Writers' Workshop (in Manhattan) for more than six years, which means that I have met more than one thousand people who want to learn to be writers.

Any successes in that bunch?

A few, if what you mean by success is that they went on and got a story published.

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The idea for my novel, The Fiction Class, came to me when I was at a funeral for someone I didn't know. Not only didn't I know the deceased, I didn't know anyone at the funeral (except for one person, and she was busy.) So, I was sitting in the pew, beginning to get that anxious feeling I get when I think I should be doing something friendly, but can't think what, and out of nowhere a woman launched herself at me and began to tell a story about her mother.

It was a funny story, and as soon as she had done, I shot back with a story about my own mother; then another woman came along and told a story about hers and soon there was a cluster of us, all of us bonding over our mothers, laughing and forming friendships. (Actually, none of us knew the deceased, but that's another novel.)

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Susan Breen is our guest blogger during the week of February 25th. If you have any questions for Susan Breen, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Fiction Class:

On paper, Arabella Hicks seems more than qualified to teach her fiction class on the Upper West Side: she's a writer herself; she's passionate about books; she's even named after the heroine in a Georgette Heyer novel.

On the other hand, she's thirty-eight, single, and has been writing the same book for the last seven years. And she has been distracted recently: on the same day that Arabella teaches her class she also visits her mother in a nursing home outside the city. And every time they argue. Arabella wants the fighting to stop, but, as her mother puts it, "Just because we're family, doesn't mean we have to like each other." When her class takes a surprising turn and her lessons start to spill over into her weekly visits, she suddenly finds she might be holding the key to her mother's love and, dare she say it, her own inspiration. After all, as a lifelong lover of books, she knows the power of a good story.