Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

If fiction dictates that a writer identify only the race of non-white characters, then craft is a tool used to normalize whiteness. If race is a factor only in stories with characters of color, then craft must be different for fiction with characters of color than it is for fiction with white characters. Otherwise, if any mention of race affects a story, then, like setting, race must be a part of any craft discussion.

We still talk about plot the way Aristotle wrote about it over two thousand years ago, when he argued that plot should be driven by character.

What we call craft is in fact nothing more or less than a set of expectations. Those expectations are shaped by workshop, by reading, by awards and gatekeepers, by biases about whose stories matter and how they should be told. How we engage with craft expectations is what we can control as writers. The more we know about the context of those expectations, the more consciously we can engage with them.

They represent the values of the culturally dominant population: in America that means (straight, cis, able, upper-middle-class) white males. When craft is taught unreflexively, within a limited understanding of the canon, it reinforces narrow ideas about whose stories are important and what makes a story beautiful, moving, or good.

rethink craft and the teaching of it to better serve writers with increasingly diverse backgrounds, which means ...

Craft is a set of expectations.

Expectations are not universal; they are standardized. It is like what we say about wine or espresso: we acquire “taste.” With each story we read, we draw on and contribute to our knowledge of what a story is or should be. This is true of cultural standards as fundamental as whether to read from left to right or right to left, just as it is true of more complicated context such as how to appreciate a sentence like “She was absolutely sure she hated him,” which relies on our expectation that stating a person’s certainty casts doubt on that certainty as well as our expectation that fictional hatred often turns into attraction or love. Our appreciation then relies on but also reinforces our expectations.

Immigrant Acts, theorist Lisa Lowe argues that the novel regulates cultural ideas of identity, nationhood, gender, sexuality, race, and history. Lowe suggests that Western psychological realism, especially the bildungsroman/coming-of-age novel, has tended toward stories about an individual reincorporated into society—an outsider finds his place in the world, though not without loss. Other writers and scholars share Lowe’s reading. Examples abound: In Jane Eyre, Jane marries Rochester. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet marries Mr. Darcy. In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer, after some hesitation, marries May Welland.

all end up incorporated into society. A common craft axiom states that by the end of a story, a protagonist must either change or fail to change. These novels fulfill this expectation. In the end, it’s not only the characters who find themselves trapped by societal norms. It’s the novels.

But expectations are not a bad thing. In a viral craft talk on YouTube, author Kurt Vonnegut graphs several archetypal (Western) story structures, such as “Man in a Hole” (a protagonist gets in trouble and then gets out of it) and Cinderella (which Vonnegut jokes automatically earns an author a million dollars). The archetypes are recognizable to us the way that beats in a romantic comedy are recognizable to us—a meet-cute, mutual dislike, the realization of true feelings, consummation, a big fight, some growing up, and a reunion (often at the airport). The fulfillment of expectations is pleasurable.

Research suggests that children learn more from a story they already know. What they do not learn is precisely: other stories.

Craft is also about omission. What rules and archetypes standardize are models that are easily generalizable to accepted cultural preferences. What doesn’t fit the model is othered.

Craft is the history of which kind of stories have typically held power—and for whom—so it also is the history of which stories have typically been omitted.

we have certain expectations for what a story is or should include means we also have certain expectations for what a story isn’t or shouldn’t include. Any story relies on negative space, and a tradition relies on the negative space of history. The ability for a reader to fill in white space relies on that reader having seen what could be there. Some readers are asked to stay always, only, in the negative. To wield craft responsibly is to take responsibility for absence.

“A Journey Into Speech,” Michelle Cliff writes about how she had to break from accepted craft in order to tell her story. Cliff grew up under colonial rule in Jamaica and was taught the “King’s English” in school. To write well was to write in one specific mode. She went to graduate school and even published her dissertation, but when she started to write directly about her experience, she found that it could not be represented by the kind of language and forms she had learned. In order to include her own experience, Cliff says she had to reject a British “cold-blooded dependence on logical construction.” She mixed vernacular with the King’s English, mixed Caribbean stories and ways of storytelling with British. She wrote in fragments, to embody her fragmentation. She reclaimed the absences that formed the way she spoke and thought, that created the “split-consciousness” she lived with. To own her writing—I am paraphrasing—was to own herself. This is craft.

Craft is both much more and much less than we’re taught it is.

post–World War II MFA programs, Eric Bennett documents how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first place to formalize the education of creative writing, fundraised on claims that it would spread American values of freedom, of creative writing and art in general

individualism is itself an ideology. (It shouldn’t surprise us that apolitical writing has long been a political stance.)

Craft is about who has the power to write stories, what stories are historicized and who historicizes them, who gets to write literature and who folklore, whose writing is important and to whom, in what context. This is the process of standardization. If craft is teachable, it is because standardization is teachable. These standards must be challenged and disempowered. Too often craft is taught only as what has already been taught before.

In the West, fiction is inseparable from the project of the individual. Craft as we know it from Aristotle to E. M. Forster to John Gardner rests on the premise that a work of creative writing represents an individual creator, who, as Ezra Pound famously put it, “makes it new.” Not on the premise that Thomas King describes in The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative: that any engagement with speaking is an engagement with listening, that to tell a story is always to retell it, and that no story has behind it an individual. Each “chapter” of King’s book, in fact, begins and ends almost the same way and includes a quote from another Native writer.

Audre Lorde puts it this way: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean.”

engaging with the expectations their stories had accrued over many tellings.

Individualism does not free one from cultural expectations; it is a cultural expectation.

Fiction does not “make it new;” it makes it felt. Craft does not separate the aut...

Craft is never neutral. Craft is the cure or injury that can be done in our shared world when it isn’t acknowledged that there are different ways that world is felt.

Since craft is always about expectations, two questions to ask are: Whose expectations? and Who is free to break them?

Audre Lorde again: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Lorde presents a difficult problem for people who understand that freedom is never general but always freedom for someone: how to free oneself from oppression while using the language of one’s oppressors? This is a problem Lorde perhaps never fully “solved.” Maybe it has no solution, but it can’t be dismissed. When we are first handed craft, we are handed the master’s tools. We are told we must learn the rules before we can dismantle them. We build the master’s house, and then we look to build houses of our own, but we are given no new tools. We must find them or we must work around the tools we have.

To wield craft is always to wield a tool that already exists. Author Trinh Minh-ha writes that even the expectation of “clarity” is an expectation of what is “correct” and/or “official” lang...

E. M. Forster’s original definition of roundness is “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” Chinweizu et al. point out that this definition is clear evidence that roundness comes not from the author’s words but from the audience’s reading. One reader from one background might be convincingly surprised while another reader from another background might be unsurprised and/or unconvinced by the same character. Whom are we writing for?

Expectations belong to an audience. To use craft is to engage with an audience’s bias. Like freedom, craft is always craft for someone. Whose expectations does a writer prioritize? Craft says something about who deserves their story told. Who has agency and who does not. What is worthy of action and what description. Whose bodies are on display. Who changes and who stays the same. Who controls time. Whose world it is. Who holds meaning and who gives it.

the craft of American fiction is to use Black people and images and culture as symbols, as tools. In other words, the craft of American fiction is the tool that names who the master is.

To engage in craft is always to engage in a hierarchy of symbolization (and to not recognize a hierarchy is to hide it). Who can use that hierarchy, those tools? Not I, says Morrison. And so she sets off to find other craft.

The Art of the Novel, Czech author Milan Kundera rejects psychological realism as the tradition of the European novel. He offers an alternate history that begins with Don Quixote and goes through Franz Kafka. He offers this history in order to make a claim about craft, because he knows that craft must come from somewhere. Contrary to psychological realism’s focus on individual agency, Kundera’s alternate craft says that the main cause of action in a novel is the world’s “naked” force.

Kundera wants to decenter internal causation (character-driven plot) and (re)center external causation (such as an earthquake or fascism or God). He insists that psychological realism is no “realer” than the bureaucratic world Kafka presents in which individuals have little or no agency and everything is a function of the system.

Any novel, for Kundera, is about a possible way of “being in the world,” and Kafka’s bureaucracy came true in the Czech Republic in a way that individual agency did not.

author Julio Cortázar. Cortázar is usually considered a fabulist or magical realist. Yet in a series of lectures collected in Literature Class, he categorizes his own and other “fantastic” stories as simply more inclusive realities.

“The Island at Noon” as an example, in which a character dives into the ocean to save a drowning man, only to find that the man is himself. The story ends with a fisherman walking onto the beach we have just seen, alone “as always.” The swimmer and the drowner were never there. Cortázar says this story represents a real experience of time in which, like a daydream, it becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is not. Time, fate, magic—these are forces beyond human agency that to Cortázar allow literature to “make reality more real.”

Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, Chinweizu et al. encourage African writers to remember African traditions of storytelling. They identify four conventions from a tradition of incoporating the fantastic into everyday life: (1) spirit beings have a non-human trait that gives them away, such as floating; (2) if a human visits the spiritland, it involves a dangerous border-crossing; (3) spirits have agency and can possess...

Ask yourself some of these questions: What is your protagonist aware of? What forces shape her/his/their awareness? What is the narrator aware of? What forces shape that awareness? What awareness shapes the idea of who the implied author is? What awareness shapes the idea of who the implied reader is? What is noticed says something about what is worth noticing and who is worth noticing and what world the characters—and author and audience—accordingly inhabit.

Almost nothing in a story is neutral, since almost everything in a story contributes to the context in which the story’s audience finds meaning.

“Kim was afraid of apples” and “Kim ate an apple.”

If Kim eats the apple before her fear, it is possible to read these sentences as meaning that eating the apple made Kim afraid of apples.

If Kim eats the apple after her fear, then it is possible to read these sentences as meaning that Kim...

This example may also be complicated through how much space comes between the sentences. A story that starts with “Kim was afraid of apples” and ends with “Kim ate an apple” would likely encourage its reader to interpret what comes between as what helped Kim overcome her fear. The eating of an apple would signal a much greater meaning.

“Kim was afraid of apples. Yoon ate an apple. Kim ate an apple.”) would also give meaning to the act of eating the apple, but that act might not be interpreted as a major change, rather as a response, an attitude, an attraction, etc.

things are chronological, but even when the sentences do not follow chronology, placement matters. “Kim ate an apple. In the past, Kim had been afraid of apples.” This order is still different from: “In the past, Kim had been afraid of apples. Kim ate an apple.” The difference may be slight, but there is a difference.

“In the past, Kim had been a racist. Kim hugged her Asian friend.” Versus: “Kim hugged her Asian friend. In the past, Kim had been ...

Extended to larger parts of a story, like scene, the order of...

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven,” in which a daughter narrates her mother’s crush on a family friend. At the end of the story, the grown-up narrator reveals a secret: that after the friend got married, the mother doused herself in gasoline and stood in the yard with matches. The final line of the story is about how the narrator came to know this secret. It gives us the context of this revelation: the mother revealed her near-suicide when the narrator’s own heart was broken. We are reminded that amid the drama of her mother’s unrequited love, the daughter not only played witness but also lived her own life affected by the love she witnessed. Before this ending, it is easy to forget about the narrator as an active character, since the mother’s story is...

Korean reverend falsely accused of betraying his fellow Christians in the name of Communism. Bennett writes that Kim was known in the Workshop as the Korean vet who “took so long to read an English sentence that no one could remember what was wrong with it” and who kept asking the “annoying” question “But what is the meaning of that?” (Bennett’s emphasis).