Craft in the Real World
They wanted to learn and get better, and they were on the whole open to his insights and suggestions, so when he told them he couldn’t tell from their actual words on the page what a character looked like or what they cared about, or that he didn’t feel compelled to go along with them on their personal journeys because he hadn’t been sufficiently e
... See moreJean Hanff Korelitz • The Plot
Writing is routinely described as “creative”—this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Exper
... See moreZadie Smith • Intimations: Six Essays
The critic Dave Hickey has written about this, the notion that saying what art should do might enable a reactionary establishment to start saying what it must do, and then to begin silencing those artists whose works aren’t doing that. In other words, whenever we get up on the soapbox and sing fiction’s praises, explaining how good it is for everyo
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis, ... See more