Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

let’s go beyond that to what conflict in a story means about the story’s place in the real world.

No fiction exists in a vacuum. Even if a story is just about a character who wants ice cream, the character is not without a context, and neither is the ice cream for that matter, and so neither is the desire or the conflict.

The author must make a choice, and whatever conflict ends up in the story is exactly that: a choice, with consequences and meaning.

In addition, conflict must come from somewhere. The kind of conflict in the example above suggests that conflict is about luck/circumstance but can be conquered through free will. That’s a moral stance.

One of the major issues I have with the way conflict is currently taught is the idea that it should come out of the protagonist and be solved by the protagonist

Straight cis able white male fiction has a tendency to present the world as a matter of free will.

problems are caused by the self and can be solved by the development of the self. And somehow both external and...

The novel, intentionally or not, puts forward the idea that everything is up to free will, even for people of color, and that what stands in a person’s way is his own darkness. This isn’t Le Guin’s intention. Her intention was to upset traditional frameworks. She says so in her afterword. But conflict has consequences for meaning.

Conflict presents a worldview, along a spectrum from complete agency to a life dictated completely by circumstance. Some lives are mostly dictated by circumstance, by fate or DNA or place or other individuals or what have you.

One of my favorite exercises for characterization I learned from a quick craft class led by the author Danzy Senna: Start a series of sentences about the same character with “S/he/they were the kind of person who . . .” One of the best things about this exercise is that as you exhaust what you already know (both personally and culturally) about what kind of character the character is, you get to really interesting discoveries about what makes your character a “kind.”

think about a character’s “attitude”—and I have taught attitude alongside Janet Burroway’s four methods of direct characterization: “speech, action, appearance, and thought,”

an exercise that has helped my students and myself with characterization, plot, world-building, and so forth, is to write a list of every decision a character makes in a story, in order, skipping nothing, not even what they choose to wear that day or negative choices (things they choose not to do).

Just as any story begins with something out of the ordinary (a journey, a visit from a stranger), any character begins in differentiation. In other words, there is no “everyman” character; there is only the character who seems most culturally normal (to a given audience) when compared to the rest of the cast.

It makes it obvious when a character’s one difference from other characters is her race or sexuality or ableness or class (etc.). Too often these identity markers are the only form of characterization, for supporting characters in particular, which means that the author thinks, for example, being Asian is characterizing in a way that being white is not, and therefore has not thought beyond Asianness to what makes a character stand apart.

Writing other characters with similar but different types in fact helps make each type stand out.

the best ways to emphasize the heart of gold the asshole has is to introduce an asshole without a heart of gold (and/or the “too nice” character who gets stuck in the friend zone).

The easiest way to make the protagonist’s change stand out is to write a similar character w...

It’s easy to explain that what makes an elf an elf may be his difference from a human or an orc (different types), but what makes an elf a Legolas is his difference from other elves (difference within the same type).

readers’ expectations for fiction are created by their previous experiences with fiction—in other words, by culture. When writers use craft, they are making choices based on which cultural expectations to engage with.

To say a work of fiction is unrelatable is to say, “I am not the implied audience, so I refuse to engage with the choices the author has made.”

We must always ask: Relatable to whom?

Which brings us back to the elephant in the room—to call a manuscript “relatable” is really to make a claim about who the audience is or should be.

Should the author revise her manuscript to make it more relatable to the reader at hand (i.e. the workshop)? This takes us into dangerous territory. A writer can easily lose her...

if you look at a dragon one way, it’s evil, and if you look at it another way, it’s good. (If you look at Robin Hood one way, he’s a thief, and if you look at him another way, he’s a hero.) In fiction, the author decides how we look—or how the implied reader looks—which means the author decides whether a character is (implicitly) “relatable” or not, and for whom.

“It’s not believable,” one reader says about an all-day bike ride (to use an example from my MFA); “it’s not realistic, this wouldn’t happen.” It’s obvious, though, that this criticism can’t be literal, since the same person might happily read about wizards or watch a superhero film.

On a craft level, the complaint that something is not “believable” or “realistic” or that we don’t “buy it” or that it’s not “earned” is really an indication that the story doesn’t seem to recognize that something unusual has happened.

One of the most useful tricks I learned in my MFA was Margot Livesey’s response to a believability complaint: “Just make someone in the story question it.” If a character within the story brings up the objection, then readers are often happy to let someone else make it. This also gives the writer a chance, whether she uses it or not, to provide context.

This may be why it is so common for novel characters to say they feel like they are in a novel, and why it is so common for movie characters to say they feel like they are in a movie.

In the kind of magical realism where magic is normal, no characters question the magic. They all expect it. If one character, for example, questions the dead lover becoming a zombie, but everyone else sees it coming, this is a different story than if everyone sees it coming or no one sees it coming or half and half.

I heard Kazuo Ishiguro talk about strangeness as a dial, that he thinks of it as turning the dial up or down, that if a tiger walks into a boardroom and everyone freaks out, the dial is turned down to our “reality,” and if everyone ignores the tiger, the dial is turned far up.

the book world often demands vulnerability disproportionately from writers of color, especially from women of color and LGBTQ+ people of color—as if these writers are expected to put their lived experience on display in order to publish.

This demand for personal vulnerability starts with our cultural expectation that people of color should submit themselves for public consumption (consumption that is economic, intellectual, and emotional).

The writer who claims the freedom to write from any perspective, say, should be aware that it takes an investment in that perspective on the page, and that this investment is open to critique in the real world.

Setting as character is often a veiled way of praising work from or, even more so, about minority communities, if that work is considered evocative by a white audience.

a farm kid returning to the farm for an audience of current and former farm kids (if this farm story explains what a tractor is, it rejects its readers’ place in its world, catering instead to an outside gaze).

If I’ve gotten away from how to use setting, it’s because the effects of noticing are profound. What is noticed depends on who does the noticing.

Perhaps one of the reasons a white author might have trouble writing a protagonist of color is that the author is noticing the wrong things. The author is thinking of setting as a character of its own rather than reliant on character.

setting is tied intrinsically to character, plot, theme, arc, and so on.

What is your protagonist aware of? What forces shape her/his/their awareness? What is the narrator aware of? What forces shape that awareness? What awareness shapes the idea of who the implied author is?

What awareness shapes the idea of who the implied reader is?

I heard that a famous professor at Iowa taught a course in which all stories had to be exactly fifteen pages, which he said was the perfect length for publication.

a craft book by a literary writer who turned to genre, that all chapters should be under ten pages.

A professor in my PhD program mentioned that one way to keep up the pace of a novel is to cut the chapters in the middle of an a...

This made me used to a certain pace, where a story had to start, expand, and come to some kind of ending in more than three thousand and fewer than five thousand words.

After about half a decade of revision, I finally got up the courage to throw out the idea of chapters altogether. It felt terrifying and wrong, but by getting rid of my expectations of what a chapter is supposed to be, I was able to find a pace that fit both my pitch and the information I was trying to transmit.

Manuel Gonzales’s story “Farewell, Africa,” which takes place in a near future in which the water level rises and submerges certain parts of the world, the narrator is a reporter who attends a kind of Met Gala full of privileged guests. The central work of art is supposed to be a reenactment of the continent of Africa sinking into the ocean

Americans often seem obsessed with what comes first—with beginnings, with “newness” or “originality”—and with what comes last—with what is dominant in the end.

The evaluation of meaning by how things end appeals to a sense of domination, as in the story of colonization. In some cultures, there are no lasts, only cycles, and firsts are politely refused or mistrusted.

Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He quotes letters from Workshop cofounder Paul Engle to friends and funders, in which Engle sometimes describes his investment in craft as an ideological weapon against the spread of Communism. In one letter, Engle writes that he is convinced, “with a fervor approaching smugness,” that the tradition of Western literature “is precisely what these people [in the East], in their cloudy minds, need most.”

If you have been taught to write fiction in America, it is a good bet that you have been taught a style popularized by Ernest Hemingway and later by Raymond Carver, sometimes described as “invisible,” that is committed to limiting the use of modifiers and metaphors, to the concrete over the abstract, to individual agency and action, and to avoiding overt politics (other than the politics of white masculinity).