Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

The tradition of stories within stories, looping or intersection or nesting or framing or so forth, in which we could include contemporary novels like the American middle-grade novel Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin, and the Chinese literary novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, by Mo Yan, is a tradition that goes back at least to the Thousand and One Nights. A better understanding of this tradition would, for example, have allowed critics to see recent novels like Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as Western adaptations of long-held Eastern storytelling practices rather than as products of brilliant innovation. 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?

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