Lessons learned while writing a novel: How the act of writing fiction can enhance the study and teaching of literature

Literature is vital to our culture and is studied extensively throughout all levels of the American system of education. Yet when a student takes a literature course, she or he studies and reads prose, poetry, and drama that has been created by others. Students learn to read and critique already-done literature. This is not the case in other disciplines. In math classes, for example, students learn to do math, to solve problems. The question is, then, shouldn't we in English studies classes examine more closely how literature is done, how it is made? Shouldn't students experience the making of literature? A case can be made that we should offer students in English studies classes the experience of creating literature, of writing fiction, prose, poetry, or drama. This dissertation has two parts: an opening essay, in which I argue that the making of fiction in the classroom, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, can and should be a viable and valuable part of education itself; and a work of fiction entitled Two Billion Beats, which is the experiment of writing fiction as part of a literary education worked out in actual practice.