Beginning with the story of a student's essay on her grandfather's death, this paper considers how paradox plays out in the writing classroom. The paper then suggests how what is called "ordinary writing" elucidates how writers make texts, providing students with the tools necessary to see how all writing, including their own, is made. It focuses specifically on the form and content of personal narratives for several reasons: first, the instructor/author encourages students to write personal narratives because personal writing gives students more authority to write--in the personal narrative students are more fully in charge of making both the subject and the text; and secondly, the personal narrative, traditionally undergirded by a "so what" that ties the particular into the universal and orders the story, illuminates very clearly one way in which the paradox is set in motion by a failure to make clear that the "so what" is a process of reducing possibility, the writerly process of filling in gaps. (NKA)