Writing can be taught most effectively when teachers build the disorienting characteristics of reading literature into the inventive stages (prewriting and revision) of writing literary interpretations. The reading of literature and the process of composing interpretive essays are both different and similar. They are similar because they are both processes occurring over space and time that are informed and controlled by objectively shared conventions and subjectively experienced reactions to outside, "public" events. They are different because one--the reading of literature--explicitly emphasizes the function of cognitive dissonance in the construction of meaning, while the other--the writing of interpretive essays--results in a product that transcribes dissonance into ordered, clearly developed, coherent applications of theses. A story such as William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" can become the reader's means of learning to question and revise hypotheses, while writing an interpretive response to part or all of "Barn Burning" offers the reader a means of putting the answer to those questions in continuous and ordered form. (Three sequentially organized writing exercises on "Barn Burning" are offered and explained for their attendance to this approach to teaching literature and composition as integrated, complementary activities.) (RL)