Craft in the Real World

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.

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.

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.

We still talk about plot the way Aristotle wrote about it over two thousand years ago, when he argued that plot should be driven by character. When we continue to teach plot this way, we ignore both the many other kinds of plot found in literatures around the world and even the context of Aristotle’s original complaint (he was fed up with the fate/

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

Literary criticism tells us that the Western novel is a product of the middle class. It is written by people in the middle class for an audience of people in the middle class.

The challenge is this: to take craft out of some imaginary vacuum (as if meaning in fiction is separate from meaning in life) and return it to its cultural and historical context.

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,