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.

a decade ago, I sat silently in an MFA workshop while mostly white writers discussed my race. I had decided not to name the race of any character, Asian American or otherwise—but the workshop demanded that the story inform “the reader” if my characters were like me, people of color.

didn’t have to ask why the white writers in the room never identified the race of their white characters. I already knew why: they believed that white is literature’s default.

If fiction dictates that a writer

identify only the race of non-white

white characters, then craft is a tool used to nor...

Our current methods of teaching craft date back to at least 1936 and the creation of the Iowa Writers’

Paul Engle, a white poet from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who was invested in what scholar Eric Bennett calls “Iowa as the home of the free individual, of the poet at peace with democratic capitalism, of the novelist devoted to the contemporary outlines of liberty.”

the Workshop never meant craft to be neutral. Craft expressed certain artistic and social values that could be weaponized against the threat of Communism.

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.

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.

the fiction writer must break down what she thinks she knows about her craft in order to liberate it.

write and teach Asian American literature and will use it as an example throughout, but never as an example of what Asian American literature should do, only as an example of what Asian American literature can do and has done for me.

Craft in the Real World primarily builds on two basic questions: Why do we limit our ideas about craft and workshop? and How do we start changing things?

To make craft accessible and inclusive, we must pull back the curtain on what craft is and does.

you will find no lightning bolts, no genius, no voices-in-my-head here.

reject the mystification/mythification of cr...

He (since it is almost always a he) benefits from keeping up the illusions that he has natural talent and...

Make no mistake—writing is power. What this fact should prompt us to ask is: What kind of power is it, where does it come from, and what does it mean?

In order to become a writer at all, writing has to seem possible as a career path. Reading has to seem as valuable as work, friendships, dating, etc.

fiction can never be separated from its place in the world. Even the choice to write about something completely imaginary—elves and wizards—is a choice

made by someone reacting to the world in which they live by fantasizing about another.

To meet expectations is not inherently bad. I love romantic comedies that stick close to the formula.

Most of the TV we love is very formulaic.

This book is against the idea of “finding” an audience and for the idea of writing toward the audience whose expectations matter to you.

Even a sentence like “She walked to the grocery store” requires some cultural context. What a grocery store is like, what challenges walking presents, perhaps an entire setting can be called to mind in the gaps between words and the way those gaps are filled in by a reader’s personal and cultural assumptions.

The traditional workshop does not work without shared assumptions. It doesn’t work if some of the writers in the room have different audiences or expectations—as in the workshop where I was told to race characters of color.

Imagine, for example, a conversation about gardening

in which other gardeners look at your garden and tell you about it without allowing you to talk about your attempts to grow it.

the traditional model does not work in the real world. The “gag rule” tells those who are silenced that in order to speak they must speak with an acceptable voice.

it says to the silent author: You own your story but not how you get to tell it or whom you get to tell it to.

story must be framed so that the majority can read vi...

Workshop should be a place that helps a writer see and re-see for herself.

The goal of workshop should be to provide the tools a writer will use long after the workshop disbands.

Has it instead become a place in which we teach write...

Workshop has created many axioms: “show, don’t tell,” “write what you know,” “kill your darlings,” etc. Writers have pushed back against those axioms, but we must also push back against the context that creates them, that nurtures them and passes them on. If not, we simply recreate the same exceptions within the same culturally defined argument we were taught to engage in.

I teach my students that it can be to their advantage in fiction to use the dialogue tags “say” and “ask” instead of less common tags like “commented” or “queried.” This is a strategy I myself was taught. The usual reasoning goes like this: the tags “say” and “ask” are effectively “invisible” to readers, so they take the reader’s focus off the tag and put it on who is talking.

I tell my students that if the main purpose of a particular tag is not who is speaking but how the character speaks, such as in a shout or a whisper, then those dialogue tags (“she shouted,” “they whispered”) become useful for the very fact that they are not “invisible.”

if every writer in America started using the word “queried,” then American readers would start to treat “queried” as invisible.

To learn craft is to learn how to use cultural expectations to your advantage.

I’ve had the experience of assigning Hemingway to ESL readers, thinking of his simplicity, only for them to ask why Hemingway is such a bad writer. Why the hell does he keep using the same dialogue tags over and over? Why doesn’t he know any bigger words?

certainly any aspect of craft that relies on shared meanings relies on shared culture.

This is why aspiring writers should read a lot, and why artists learn art history, and why certain fiction gets grouped together under terms like “Modernism” or “Fantasy.”

Imagine a writer from a culture that uses “query” enrolls in a creative writing workshop in our “ask” culture. How much would the repetition of “queried” frustrate the workshop? The writer might even be convinced to use “ask” from then on.

To switch to using “ask” is to switch audiences. “Ask” is not for readers from the writer’s “query” culture but for the workshop. Suddenly the writer has changed allegiances.

careful not to frame craft as prescription or even guidelines without first making it clear where those guidelines...

the dominance of one tradition of craft, serving one particular audience (white, middle-class, straight, able, etc.), is...

What’s the big deal, these privileged writers will ask: Why not encourage writers to reach a “wide” “mainstream” audience? Even if they want to experiment, they should know tradition first. In other words: “You have to know the rules in order to break them.”