Craft in the Real World

Over a decade ago, I sat silently in an MFA workshop while mostly white writers discussed my race. I had decided not to name the race of any character, Asian American or otherwise—but the workshop demanded that the story inform “the reader” if my characters were like me, people of color.

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? If we take from Aristotle his idea of plot, for example, we should also remember that he believed art relied on slavery: slaves freed their masters to think and create. For the most part, writing has

the lesson of this book is not that any writer should be able to use any cultural expectation no matter her identity position. An understanding that craft is cultural will also bring up issues of how to engage with craft appropriately, and those issues are inadequately addressed here.

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 mystical writer uses the myth of his genius to gain power. He (since it is almost always a he) benefits from keeping up the illusions that he has natural talent and that writing cannot be taught.

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.

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—“

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.

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.