Craft works best, then, when a writer and reader share the same cultural background. If a writer were to use “ask” in a culture where “queried” is the invisible term, then “ask” would draw attention to itself—

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“Iowa as the home of the free individual, of the poet at peace with democratic capitalism, of the novelist devoted to the contemporary outlines of liberty.” (You will find more about this history later in the book.) In other words, the Workshop never meant craft to be neutral.

any mention of race affects a story, then, like setting, race must be a part of any craft discussion.

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.