Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

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. To teach the writer from a “query” culture to use “ask” is not to teach her how to write better but to teach her whose writing is better. 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? What is official always has to do with power.

She has to learn a whole new value system, a whole new tradition. If she believes that she must learn that tradition’s rules before she can break them, then she has to become a part of that tradition before she can figure out whether or not its craft will be useful to her old tradition.

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.

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 author from the real world.