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Imagine, for example, a conversation about gardening in which other gardeners look at your garden and tell you about it without allowing you to talk about your attempts to grow it.
Your story must be framed so that the majority can read via their own lens.
To learn craft is to learn how to use cultural expectations to your advantage.
The argument that one should know the rules before breaking them is really an argument about who gets to make the rules, whose rules get to be the norms and determine the exceptions.
I began this essay in response to a writer friend asking why writers of color don’t write “pure craft” essays, rather than craft essays about race.
Hm not a question I'd hope to get from a friend
Whose expectations does a writer prioritize? Craft says something about who deserves their story told.
It is easy to forget whom we are writing for if we do not keep it a conscious consideration, and the default is not universal, but privileged. To name the race only of characters of color, for example, because that is how you’ve seen books do it before, is to write to a white audience.
The term microaggression is for people who need to distinguish less obvious racist attacks from more obvious racist attacks, or unintentional racism from intentional racism. My struggle is generally with the effects, not with the intention.
Yet it’s about time that individual agency stops dominating how we think about plot or even causality. If we canonize E. M. Forster and Aristotle, it should be as representatives of one tradition among many.
Straight cis able white male fiction has a tendency to present the world as a matter of free will.
Conflict presents a worldview, along a spectrum from complete agency to a life dictated completely by circumstance.
to call a manuscript “relatable” is really to make a claim about who the audience is or should be.
To admit that craft has meaning is to admit that it is not a default, that it means something to someone.
No one lives or acts, or reads or writes, alone.
As one of my MFA professors used to warn, workshop is most helpful to whoever speaks the most, not to the person being workshopped.
