Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

stories that get cut out as extraneous are never actually pointless. 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.”

In Chinese fiction, repetitions and digressions like those in the Nights are called “Casual Touches” and are a sign of mastery. According to author Jianan Qian, it takes a very good writer to be able to add “seemingly unrelated details . . . here and there effortlessly to stretch and strengthen a story’s meanings.”

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

I grew up with fiction that wasn’t written for me. My desire to write was probably a desire to give myself the agency I didn’t have in life. To give my desires the power of plot.

“Reality is multiple and infinite,” he writes, and to organize it by cause and effect is to reduce it to a “slice.” Plot is always a departure from reality, a symbol of reality. But the power of stories is that we can mistake the symbolic for the real.

Craft that pretends it does not exist is the craft of conformity or, worse, complicity.

in the famous John Gardner prompt). In reality, rain is not contingent on emotion and objects do not change their appearances to fit people’s moods. (The Gardner prompt, to describe a barn from the perspective of a grieving father, is more about what a person in a certain mood would notice—but the point holds.) Baxter thinks realism should do more to resist story conventions and accurately represent reality. Yet on screen, the pathetic fallacy seems widely accepted (especially if there is no voiceover to provide a character’s thoughts), and student fiction seems more and more influenced by film expectations than prose expectations.

There is a kind of structural pleasure that comes from seeing the pathetic fallacy played out on a grand scale. It’s not the pleasure of reality, but of what we sometimes feel reality to be,

Why, when the protagonist faces the world, does she need to win, lose, or draw? This is a Western idea of conflict. (For more, see the later chapter on redefining conflict.) What if she understands herself as a part of that world, that world as a part of herself? What if she simply continues to live?

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.”

she found Kundera and his idea of the novel as existential rather than a vehicle for plot.

Craft is in the habit of making and maintaining taboos.

To consider what forces have shaped what we think of as psychological realism is to consider what forces have shaped what we think of as reality, and to consider what forces have shaped what we think of as pleasurable, as entertaining, as enlightening, in life.

Craft is support for a certain worldview.

Revision is the craft through which a writer is able to say and shape who they are and what kind of world they live in.

To be a writer is to wield and to be wielded by culture. There is no story separate from that. To better understand one’s culture and audience is to better understand how to write.

You can’t control who reads your fiction, but you can control whom you write for.

The author’s “second self”—the implied author—is the version of the author that readers imagine from the text (and even occasionally mistake for the real author).

In my PhD program, a famous author echoed a long-held argument that appears to defend Conrad from the charge of racism. Conrad was anti-colonialist, so the racist beliefs in the novel belong only to its narrator, not to him.

Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator.

nothing in the book suggests that the implied reader (and implied author) should not share the narrator’s racism. Nothing suggests that the racism is only in the narration and not in the craft.

the exceptions are a way for the African characters to be plot tools toward a colonialist plot, rather than a way to offer less colonialist characterization.

If the real Conrad did not intend to be racist, he has made racist choices.

We need to think about how to make more conscious decisions about audience and what that can do for our fiction.

We need to think, in other words, about purpose.

(Put theme and audience together, and purpose i...

Much of what we learn about craft (about the expectations we are supposed to consider) implies a straight, white, cis, able (etc.) audience. It is easy to forget whom we are writing for if we do not keep it a conscious consideration, and the default is not universal, but privileged.

To name race for no characters, for example, might seem a tempting solution, but it is a solution for no one except those who know that not naming race is an active choice against naming color.

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.

there is a way of writing about microaggressions that is about realism—where microaggressions might not be emphasized, but are included because they are a real part of life. This final way doesn’t explain what happened or try to convince anyone. It takes for granted that the audience understands and can

fill in all the gaps through shared cultural experience.

Robert Boswell said one could consider tone as the distance between the narrator and the character.

It is easy to see how a narrator who views the seriousness of the characters as funny can produce a comic effect.

If we think about what tone does for fiction, it seems to offer a kind of lens through which to understand the attitudes of the characters toward each other and toward the world.

What Aristotle is saying is that when we feel anger, for example, that anger is a register of our sudden perception of the world: We feel angry because we feel that the world is unjust.

Where we must part from Aristotle is in our current understanding that emotions are often cultural, not universal or instinctual.

What we consider unjust is shaped by shared values. If our culture says we should be able to own land, then it feels unjust when a stranger builds his house in our yard. If our culture says no one owns the land, then it does not feel unjust when a stranger builds his house in our yard. We have no yard.

Tone can last an entire story. A book that expresses one single, continuous emotion would be overwhelming.

Emotion shifts and changes.

(This may be why it is so hard to find a “happy” novel—happiness is rarely a tone, but often an ending.)

The protagonist might find the world to be a wonderful place, but the book might contradict her. This kind of contradiction often occurs in satire.

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.

Forster’s insistence on agency is really about audience. He believes that a series of events that are not causally connected (a war, then an earthquake, then two people falling in love) is for “stupid” readers.

If I touch a window and it shatters, why should I make sense of this by thinking my touch caused the window to shatter? Why shouldn’t I think it was a coincidence, and even that the coincidence is what makes it meaningful?

As a child, I used to read fiction for exactly this sense of agency: to feel that the world, which felt so out of my control, could be controlled.

To enter the books of my youth was to enter books in which a world was ordered around an individual. The protagonist walks through a door into a kingdom that has been waiting for just his appearance.

Fiction in which the world is constantly putting demands on characters, rather than the other way around—like a plague or global warming or fascism—is equally as compelling and true (if not more so to certain audiences).

When I was a fiction student, I was taught that conflict is what stands in the way of desire. There were two levels (external and internal) and three classes (man vs. man, man vs. world, man vs. self). This definition is an okay start—but it stops before it ever gets to meaning. It implies that conflict can be thrown at a character without consideration of what that conflict signifies.

I did go on to learn about theme and about what conflict means to theme