Edward P. Jones would rather be a wood carver. If he admires the artistry and skill that allow a man to cut a character from a formless block, he envies the carver's ability to judge a work in a glance, discerning in that instant if a figure's features are right, if the likeness is both striking and true. Not so with fiction-writing. "Even with a 25-page story and certainly with a novel," Jones told students on October 10, beginning a three-day campus visit for both the Buckham Lecture Series and the Burack President's Distinguished Lecture Series, "it's all so spread out... it's all these words and you can't really determine how real it is and if it will make sense to someone else down the line." Over the 388 pages of Jones' prize-winning novel, The Known World, the characters indeed sprawl out in uneasy directions, moving back and forth through time, defying conventional form. In the fictional Virginia county of Manchester, blacks are both slaves and slaveholders and even whites destined for irredeemable acts are capable, in the least, of scorching moments of humility. Americans have been handed a lot of stereotypes about this time in our history, Jones said, but human relationships are murky. "I think it's far more complex than any of us will ever realize," he said. But as Jones explained to a gathering of first-year honors students who were assigned the novel as summer reading, he leaves phrases like "moral complexity" to reviewers. As messy and amorphous as it is to create nonwooden characters, fleshed out in all their cruelty, tenderness, passion, greed and pain, for Jones, those people are everything. "All I had was all of these characters," he said. "I didn't have any lofty purpose in mind." Jones is not an evangelist, to be sure, about slavery or anything else. He is a shy, humble man, despite honors that include a Macarthur Fellowship, a Pen/Hemingway Award and National Book Award finalist for both The Known World, his first novel, and an earlier collection of short stories, Lost in the City. Yet Jones has a riveting storyteller's voice and when he raises it to decry Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves or African American stereotypes in movies, his words hit hard, just a hint of the power in his fiction. "So often you watch movies and the black people are loud, unintelligent - this fat woman, that fat woman, and the men are big and overpowering and threatening, that's all," he said, "that's all. And that's because those writers, that director, that's all they likely know. They don't know any people beyond themselves and they don't have the imagination (to portray them differently)." So Jones's first advice to the eager young writers who questioned him is to read. If that sounded like an achievable plan, the fiction writers in Jones's audiences last week - particularly those with assignments due - may have felt stymied hearing about his other methods. Jones created The Known World, with its intricate plot lines and scores of characters, entirely in his mind over the course of ten years. He never took a note. "What I've learned is that you're a writer not because you get up every single day and write. Sometimes," Jones said, "what you do in your head counts." And the ideas, he said, cannot be forced. They come to you out of the blue. At a reading a year or so ago, Jones told Professor David Huddle's advanced fiction-writing class, he was taking questions from an audience when he saw a woman with blood on her dress, walking out of a cornfield with a gun in her hands. In the background a house was burning and she was walking toward another house. You got the sense, he said, that it wasn't her house, but when she got to it she didn't knock but simply opened the door. Crafting stories fulfills a need in Jones, but the drive to write-this gift-is not exactly a blessing. Asked by a student if he's happy being a writer, Jones doesn't hesitate, but his voice is low. "No," his answer begins, then, seeing the pained reaction, it ends with a hearty laugh, "Hey, you asked me, man." "If I were God passing out what you could do," Jones said "I think writing would probably be about number 27. It's messy business because you get up in the morning and there's this emptiness there. 'Can I do it today? Is it possible? God, will I go to bed tonight and think, jeez...what a wasted day?'" But Jones also admits to those moments when he knows that he has two or three pages of really fine writing, when he reads them over with the pride of accomplishment. Still, he has no truck with egotistical writers, full of themselves and making demands. Even with the acclaim, the awards, the royalties, life for Jones hasn't changed too much. When he travels, he still takes the bus to the subway to get to the airport, and when he starts a new work, no past prizes or fulsome reviews will carry him through. "I'm always starting at the bottom of the mountain," Jones said. "We all are."