A lovely cold and sunny Friday morning, and I'm off in an hour to teach my fourth and fifth graders, though "teach" is an inaccurate word, seeing as they do 90 percent of the talking. These kids love to talk about writing--not just their own, in that self-obsessed way of many adults at open-mic readings--but everybody else's too. They are nosy. "Why wasn't there a bigger mess when you made Nico blow up the Museum of Modern Art?" they ask. "And what makes you think elephants like to run candy shops?"

These aren't you've-done-it-the-wrong-way-and-I'm-a-better-writer complaints. They are honest questions about characters or events that seemed ambiguous to the listener when the writer read aloud his or her story. It seems to me that this ability to zero in on ambiguity, and to deal with it forthrightly, without cattiness, is extraordinarily important to productive group discussion. There's a danger, in writing workshops, of being too mean. There's also the danger of being too nice. A balance between civility and honesty can be tricky to find in a classroom, so it makes me very happy to see these kids in action. And I know their question style is working because the writer's response to such remarks is always to break into a grin. "Hey, you were listening to me!" that smile says. And how often does that happen in this life?

Pamuk novel weather update: Yes, it's still snowing. And now all the roads into the city are closed, although the city streets themselves remain mysteriously passable. My husband has suggested that I write a novel titled Drizzle. We considered Partly Sunny as well, though for obvious reasons we had to reject Hail.