Once in a creative writing class I was teaching, a young writer was writing a story that touched on the horror of the holocaust. He read his first draft to the class. The story involved an old woman in a city in the Unites States. She had survived a Nazi concentration camp. Some adolescent punks in the neighborhood were harassing her in the street, calling her old or stupid or ugly or something. They didn't know she had a tattoo on her arm and some horrific memories. They didn't know they were acting not unlike a bunch of little Nazis.

The story attempted to evoke the horror of the holocaust. It mentioned the conditions in the camps, the statistics on how many were killed. As I recall, it mentioned the murder of six millions Jews.

Needless to say, the class was sympathetic to the attempt to depict the horror. But no one showed any emotional reaction to the historical information. Six million people slaughtered, and no one in the room batted an eye, let along shed a tear. Even the writer noticed this. How, he asked, could he communicate the horror.

No one had any ideas, so I suggested that maybe, for example, he have the punks grab the woman's cat and soak it in gasoline and tie a rope around the cat and hoist it, flaming, up over a power line.

Somebody in the class said that was a sick idea. And indeed it was. And indeed I'm not happy that I was capable of such a sick idea. But the horror hit everyone. And that was my point—not the horror but the specificity. Though six million industrialized deaths is far more horrific than one cat, it's impossible to imagine those six million. But the specific cat—the sight and sound and small of a specific cat—had a greater impact on the readers.

The lesson is not in depicting horror. It's in depicting the general through the specific, giving readers something they can not just imagine but effectively perceive in that weird, inexplicable way that we see visions in the little black squiggles on a page. That's what fiction does when it works.