Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

If we take from Aristotle his idea of plot, for example, we should also remember that he believed art relied on slavery: slaves freed their masters to think and create.

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.

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.

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.

Craft is in the habit of making and maintaining taboos.

in the middle of talking about the middles of novels, Robert Boswell said one could consider tone as the distance between the narrator and the character.

What is it that the author establishes via craft decisions? It is an orientation toward the world, the orientation of the implied author.

(One famous example from anthropology: the emotion “being a wild pig” makes men in New Guinea steal things and run into the woods, only to remember nothing upon their return. This emotion is socially accepted and normal. It is also learned.)

Satire works only if it encourages the implied reader to read ironically.

Forster and Aristotle object to a coincidental plot for moral reasons that have to do with their belief in the project of the individual.

Most Americans are taught in school and through the books they read and by American history and imperialism to interpret stories teleologically.

If you have been taught to write fiction in America, it is a good bet that you have been taught a style popularized by Ernest Hemingway and later by Raymond Carver, sometimes described as “invisible,” that is committed to limiting the use of modifiers and metaphors, to the concrete over the abstract, to individual agency and action, and to avoiding overt politics (other than the politics of white masculinity).

though what it really means is that the ideology of craft is to hide its ideology.

If the Workshop is supposed to spread American values without looking like it is spreading American values, what better craft for the job than the craft of hiding meaning behind style?

But more than that, I think, they all had gone through many years of school where literature is discussed via interpretation: not by asking questions of the author, but by using the text to answer questions of our own.