Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

by Matthew Salesses

If the Workshop is supposed to spread American values without looking like it is spreading American values, what better craft for the job than the craft of hiding meaning behind style?

There is no universal standard of craft—this can’t be emphasized enough—but this in no way means that fiction can be separated into on the one hand Western realism and on the other hand various exceptions to it (genre or foreign or experimental or so on). Instead, we must view other standards as exactly that—not as exceptions but as norms.

Craft is not about cultural exceptions, but about cultural expectations—which means we need to understand traditions, not individual books.

We need to learn both the conventions of a tradition and the experiments and exceptions and other genres that have influenced, resisted, and changed it.

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 Mi...

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 wh...

To break the rules as an experiment is one thing, but to want to write toward other rules that better represent one’s reality (for example) is another. The American writer of color who wants to break free of the white literary tradition might unsurprisingly think her only option is experimentalism.

For historical help, I will rely on the book Chinese Theories of Fiction, by Ming Dong Gu,

Chinese fiction comes from street talk and gossip, not the epic or the romance;

main narrative might be accompanied by commentary from another fictional character included or not in the story;

narrator or author can interrupt at any time and point out the fic...

author and reader may show up within the stor...

multiple unreliable n...

fantastic is a part of the ev...

intertextuality, especially the inclusion of ...

multiple conflicting poin...

episodic str...