Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

reading and writing are not done in a vacuum. What people read and write affects how they act in the world. If

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.

I’ll give you another example, one many creative writing instructors are familiar with—a workshop in which most people want to write “literary” fiction, but Student X and maybe a few others want to write “high fantasy.” I am not entirely versed in fantasy, but I am versed in this situation.

Now imagine a workshop of twelve people who are all interested in “literary” writing. Three of them are writers of color. Imagine that the readings are all by white writers, and the instructor is white. Imagine that this instructor keeps insisting that fiction is not ideological. I have been in that workshop too, many times. Of course, only as a student.

Writers of color in a workshop where the craft values are implicitly white, or LGBT writers in a workshop where the craft values are straight and cis, or women writers in a workshop where the craft values are patriarchal, and so on, are regularly told to “know the rules before they can break them.”

rarely told that these rules are more than “just craft” or “pure craft,” that rules are always cultural. The spread of craft start...

The writer will likely end up either in conflict or simply in confusion, not knowing (because the workshop never says it) that the criticism is not of his craft, but of his cultural position.

With each story we read, we draw on and contribute to our knowledge of what a story is or should be. This is true of cultural standards as fundamental as whether to read from left to right or right to left, just as it is true of more complicated context such as how to appreciate a sentence like “She was absolutely sure she hated him,” which relies on our expectation that stating a person’s certainty casts doubt on that certainty as well as our expectation that fictional hatred often turns into attraction or love.

A common craft axiom states that by the end of a story, a protagonist must either change or fail to change. These novels fulfill this expectation. In the end, it’s not only the characters who find themselves trapped by societal norms. It’s the novels.

In a viral craft talk on YouTube, author Kurt Vonnegut graphs several archetypal (Western) story structures, such as “Man in a Hole” (a protagonist gets in trouble and then gets out of it) and Cinderella (which Vonnegut jokes automatically earns an author a million dollars). The archetypes are recognizable to us the way that beats in a romantic comedy are recognizable to us—a meet-cute, mutual dislike, the realization of true feelings, consummation, a big fight, some growing up, and a reunion (often at the airport).

we already know certain story types and how our familiarity with them doesn’t decrease, maybe only increases, our fondness for them.

Children like to know what is coming. It reduces their anxiety, validates their predictions, and leaves them able to learn from other details. Research suggests that children learn more from a story they already know.

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.

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.

Cliff says she had to reject a British “cold-blooded dependence on logical construction.” She mixed vernacular with the King’s English, mixed Caribbean stories and ways of storytelling with British. She wrote in fragments, to embody her fragmentation. She reclaimed the absences that formed the way she spoke and thought, that created the “split-consciousness” she lived with. To own her writing—I am paraphrasing—was to own herself. This is craft.

The Workshop popularized an idea of craft as non-ideological, but its claims should make clear that individualism is itself an ideology.

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.

When I was in graduate school, a famous white writer defended Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (whose craft was famously criticized by author Chinua Achebe for the racist use of Africans as objects and setting rather than as characters) by claiming that the book should be read for craft, not race.

Craft is never neutral. 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.

Since craft is always about expectations, two questions to ask are: Whose expectations? and Who is free to break them?

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

how to free oneself from oppression while using the language of one’s oppressors? This is a problem Lorde perhaps never fully “solved.” Maybe it has no solution, but it can’t be dismissed. When we are first handed craft, we are handed the master’s tools.

We are told we must learn the rules before we can dismantle them. We build the master’s house, and then we look to build houses of our own, but we are given no new tools. We must find them or we must work around the tools we have.

Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison suggests in Playing in the Dark that the craft of American fiction is to use Black people and images and culture as symbols, as tools. In other words, the craft of American fiction is the tool that names who the master is.

To engage in craft is always to engage in a hierarchy of symbolization (and to not recognize a hierarchy is to hide it).

Who can use that hierarchy, those tools? Not I, says Morrison. And so she sets off to find other craft.

(1) spirit beings have a non-human trait that gives them away, such as floating; (2) if a human visits the spiritland, it involves a dangerous border-crossing; (3) spirits have agency and can possess

humans; and (4) spirits are not subject to human concepts of time and space.

We have come to teach plot as a string of causation in which the protagonist’s desires move the action forward. The craft of fiction has come to adopt the terms of Freytag’s triangle, which were meant to

apply to drama, and of Aristotle’s poetics, which were meant to apply to Greek tragedy.

In contrast, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese stories have developed from a four-act, rather than a three- or five-act structure: in Japanese it is called kishotenketsu (ki: introduction; sho: development; ten: twist; ketsu: reconciliation).

Western fiction can often be boiled down to A wants B and C gets in the way of it.

This kind of story shape is inherently conflict-based, perhaps also inherently male (as author Jane Alison puts it: “Something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?”).

East Asian fiction, the twist (ten) is not confrontation but surprise, something that reconfigures what its audience thinks the story is “about.”

Asian storytellers are often criticized for what basically amounts to addressing a different audience’s different expectations—

Asian fiction gets labeled “undramatic” or “plotless” by Western critics.

We are constantly telling stories—about who we are, about every person we see, hear, hear about—and when we

don’t know something, we fill in the gaps with parts of stories we’ve told or heard before.

In my research for this book, I found various authors (mostly foreign) asking how it is that we have forgotten that character is made up, that it isn’t real or universal.

Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, in The Naive and Sentimental Novelist, complains that creative writing programs make it seem as if characters are autonomous beings who have their own voices, when in fact character is a “historical construct . . .

we choose to believe in.”

To Pamuk, a character isn’t even formed by an individual personality but by the particular situation and co...

Western critics have generally called traditional Chinese fiction formless. Yet Chinese critic Zheng Zhenduo, who studies the Chinese novel’s historical trajectory, says one characteristic of Chinese fiction is that it is “water-tight,” by which he means that it is structurally sound. They are describing the same fiction but different expectations.

Chinese narrative comes from a tradition of gossip and street talk. Chinese fiction has always challenged historical record and accepted versions of “reality.”

Chinese American author Gish Jen claims in Tiger Writing that her fiction combines Western and Eastern craft. 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.

Jen compares the memoir to a Chinese teapot, which unlike an American teapot is worth much more used than new, prized for how many teas have already been made in it, so that the flavor of a new tea mixes with the flavors before it.

“the writer’s primary audience” may find the sketch enough to evoke the picture even if the European audience cannot. It shouldn’t be the writer’s concern to satisfy an audience who is not hers.

African fiction is written for Africans—what is easier to understand than that?

Not that other people can’t read it, but, as Chinweizu et al. tell us, it might take “time and effort and a sloughing off of their racist superiority complexes ...

the Thousand and One Nights is translated into English, translators often cut stories. The Nights is a story about storytelling, full of framed narrativ...