Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

Race, gender, sexuality, etc. affect our lives and so must affect our fiction. Real-world context, and particularly what we do with that context, is craft.

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.

Some of us have larger arguments at stake, arguments often about the bounds of the argument themselves, of what is and is not normal, good, beautiful.

There is, of course, a kind of writer who believes art is free from the rest of the world, as if he does not live and read and write in that world.

What people read and write affects how they act in the world. If writers really believe that art is important to actual life, then the responsibilities of actual life are the responsibilities of art.

Writing that follows nondominant cultural standards is often treated as if it is “breaking the rules,” but why one set of rules and not another?

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.

If we can admit by now that history is about who has had the power to write history, we should be able to admit the same of craft.

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.

Audre Lorde again: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

To signify light as good, as we are taught to do from our first children’s stories, is to signify darkness as bad—and in this country lightness and darkness will always be tied to a racialized history of which people are people and which people are tools.

To wield craft morally is not to pretend that those expectations can be met innocently or artfully without ideology, but to engage with the problems ideology presents and creates.

a character isn’t even formed by an individual personality but by the particular situation and context the author needs her for.

Craft is inseparable from identity. Craft does not exist outside of society, outside of culture, outside of power.

author Ming Dong Gu, in his book Chinese Theories of Fiction, describes writing as something more like “transmission” than like “creation.” More collective and less individual.

She makes a case for an Asian American storytelling that mixes the “independent” and “interdependent” self: the individual speaker vs. the collective speaker, internal agency vs. external agency.

A word spoken to no one, not even the self, has no meaning because it has no one to hear it. It has no purpose.

Author Ulrich Marzolph argues convincingly that repetition of similar stories and themes and motifs is not a failure of craft but “a highly effective narrative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares.” Children learn the most from stories they already know.

What is considered “good writing” is a matter of who is reading it.

In America, coincidence and fate have long been the domain of storytellers of color, for whom the “naked” force of the world is an everyday experience.

Jen writes that the American novel tends to separate time into events and to see those events as progression, as development—a phenomenon she calls “episodic specificity.

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.

When we write fiction, we write the world. Even if that world looks almost the same as ours, it will always be a representation, not a universal. If there is a distance tone inhabits, it is the distance between our world and the world of the story.

Character should be particular and specific and have a particular and specific context. In that context, the question of how much of the conflict you face is a matter of fate or free will has meaningful consequences. Conflict, in context, makes meaning.

to call a manuscript “relatable” is really to make a claim about who the audience is or should be.

the usefulness of relatability to craft is really about how an implied author presents a character to an implied reader

In fiction, the author decides how we look—or how the implied reader looks—which means the author decides whether a character is (implicitly) “relatable” or not, and for whom.

The ability of the real reader to share the implied reader’s beliefs gives a story its maximum (intended) impact.

measure of belief within a story is something an author can actually control and use to say something about the world of the story and even about the world in which we live.

like everything else, vulnerability is a matter of privilege and power and must be considered within a system of privilege and power.

The writer who claims the freedom to write from any perspective, say, should be aware that it takes an investment in that perspective on the page, and that this investment is open to critique in the real world.

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.

The evaluation of meaning by how things end appeals to a sense of domination, as in the story of colonization.

structure organizes meaning in a certain way only directed toward a certain audience, and the author’s choice of audience, whether intentional or not, is the foundational choice.

To admit that craft has meaning is to admit that it is not a default, that it means something to someone.

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?

How can a writer know the many possibilities of what they can do without knowing many different ways that things have been done before and where their possibilities have come from?

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.

Different readerships are overlooked or othered, the result of which is to make difference an exception. Difference becomes a burden, one that falls upon writers already burdened by their difference in the world.

It is effectively a kind of colonization to assume that we all write for the same audience or that we should do so if we want our fiction to sell.

the real-world silencing simply reinforces the idea that the marginalized writer should be writing toward the workshop and power.

I wonder, too, whether the cone of silence actually encourages writers to think that this is the way life should be—that the person who should benefit most from speaking is the person who has the most power to speak.

It is hard to go from being the center to centering someone else. We see this truth every day. It is difficult to give up power.