Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

literary imperialism,

In the end, it’s not only the characters who find themselves trapped by societal norms. It’s the novels.

How do you begin to untrap the novel?

We need to think, in other words, about purpose. (Put theme and audience together, and purpose is what you get.)

it’s about time that individual agency stops dominating how we think about plot or even causality.

Janet Burroway’s four methods of direct characterization: “speech, action, appearance, and thought,”

To say a work of fiction is unrelatable is to say, “I am not the implied audience, so I refuse to engage with the choices the author has made.”

The worst fiction we can write is fiction that doesn’t even speak for itself.

Because craft is about expectations, unfamiliarity is one of craft’s most serious problems.

Writers must read much more widely and much more deeply, if we are to know enough craft to start to critique other writers fairly and to write truly for ourselves.

This is a problem with workshops all the way up to the MFA level. No one's read any damn thing. Their views are so limiting. I myself am often unsure about how much and how diversely ive read.

Nothing is separate or individual from anything else. No one lives or acts, or reads or writes, alone.

Very Buddha. And something ive bern tewching for years now. A writer alone is no writer.

13. Elements of Fiction

I really like this idea for my class at GBCC but it would take some reworking of the class. Maybe less modeling exercises with flash fiction and more lecture.....

14. Workshop the Workshop

This is cool