Craft in the Real World

reading and writing are not done in a vacuum. What people read and write affects how they act in the world. If writers really believe that art is important to actual life, then the responsibilities of actual life are the responsibilities of art.

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.

There is also a kind of writer who believes that human experience is universal, so his experience is enough to know everyone else’s. What’s the big deal, these privileged writers will ask: Why not encourage writers to reach a “wide” “mainstream” audience? Even if they want to experiment, they should know tradition first. In other words: “You have t

Especially when the workshop focuses on form and avoids content, it says to the silent author: You own your story but not how you get to tell it or whom you get to tell it to. Your story must be framed so that the majority can read via their own lens.

Some of us have larger arguments at stake, arguments often about the bounds of the argument themselves, of what is and is not normal, good, beautiful. 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.

It could easily end up harmful to both the garden and even the gardener’s desire to garden, especially if the other gardeners have experience in a different kind of garden,

One common refrain is that writers learn most from hearing what they haven’t yet realized about their own work. And this is an important aspect of workshop, just not one that is actually best served by silence.

Language evokes meaning for someone. Even a sentence like “She walked to the grocery store” requires some cultural context.

When writers use “say” or “ask,” it isn’t to get readers to register the fact that something is said or asked—the dialogue already makes this obvious. I believe this advice to be useful and true. I also know that it is cultural. We read “say” and “ask” as invisible terms not, of course, because they are invisible, and not because of their meaning—“