Craft in the Real World Quotes

“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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“For a marginalized writer writing to a normative audience, the writer has to be wary of normative craft. 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 who we are writing for if we do not keep it a conscious consideration, and the default is not universal, but privileged.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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?”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“When you are workshopped, it is important to remember that you will not connect with everything that is said. You shouldn’t! Don’t listen to everything; don’t take every suggestion—trust your instincts. Think hard, though, about all the questions asked of you. Are you making your decisions consciously enough? Are there decisions you made subconsciously that turned out to be even better (or worse) than you expected? Don’t ever try to make your story into someone else’s story, or especially the group’s story. That will ruin what you love about your story and so will ruin your story. Part of being in a writing community is learning who is a good reader for your work, and how to incorporate suggestions into your own intentions and process. Also remember that while you might not like a suggestion, the most important thing about a critique might be simply its existence. The point remains that that part of your story might have tripped up this group of test readers, and if they are reading carefully, you can use that knowledge to find your own solution or even your own problem. Also remember that sometimes making a certain part of a story work isn’t about that part of the story, but about an earlier part, or a later part, or the whole thing, or the basic foundation. What is most important is to know that there’s still work to do and to be inspired to do it.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“What is important to Aristotle is that what you feel can teach you what you think. Emotion is intelligent.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Realism insists on one representation of what is real. Not only through what is narrated on the page, but through the shape that narration takes.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Even if that world looks almost the same as ours, it will always be a representation, not a universal. If there is a distance tone inhabits, it is the distance between our world and the world of the story.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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 and imperialist arrogance” to appreciate it.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Fiction does not “make it new;” it makes it felt. Craft does not separate the author from the real world.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“A workshop should not participate in the binding but in freeing the writer from the culturally regulated boundaries of what it is possible to say and how it is possible to say it.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“This book is against the idea of “finding” an audience and for the idea of writing toward the audience whose expectations matter to you.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“We must reject the mystification/mythification of creative writing. The mystical writer uses the myth of his genius to gain power.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Workshops operate on the golden-rule policy: do for others as you want for yourself. Your fellow classmates will see from your comments what kind of feedback to give no matter how much of a push the instructor gives. Another way to think about questions and possibilities is that it’s about why and how. Instead of saying you liked this or didn’t like that, make an observation about the style or conflict or plot, etc., and ask the author what she meant.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“You should ask macro questions and point out macro opportunities. Which means, for example, you might state your understanding (or not) of the story, list observations that seem especially juicy, ask questions about what certain actions or images mean, ask questions about specific characters, open the door to new possibilities in the plot or arc or theme or so on, etc. Never skimp on the questions in favor of suggestions. Making observations and asking questions are more about the author; suggestions are more about the workshopper.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“The king dies, and then the queen dies, but the people still have laundry to do, children to feed, love to love, lives that continue in all directions, not each independent of the other, but more meaningful for how they intersect. Conflict What gives or takes away the illusion of free will When I was a fiction student, I was taught that conflict is what stands in the way of desire.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“(This may be why it is so hard to find a “happy” novel—happiness is rarely a tone, but often an ending.)”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“In fact, the only time I’ve ever heard it defined by another fiction writer was in an aside, when, in the middle of talking about the middles of novels, Robert Boswell said one could consider tone as the distance between the narrator and the character.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Like Jen, 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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Expectations belong to an audience. To use craft is to engage with an audience’s bias.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“To wield craft responsibly is to take responsibility for absence.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Some of these protagonists end up happy and some unhappy, but all end up incorporated into society. 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.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“Writers need to understand their real-world relationship to craft in order to understand their relationship to their audience and to their writing’s place in the world.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“They are rarely told that these rules are more than “just craft” or “pure craft,” that rules are always cultural. The spread of craft starts to feel and work like colonization.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“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.” These tired arguments get trotted out whenever writers are asked to take more responsibility for their positions in the world.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping