Craft in the Real World

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.

This is all another way of saying that fiction can never be separated from its place in the world. Even the choice to write about something completely imaginary—elves and wizards—is a choice made by someone reacting to the world in which they live by fantasizing about another.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The gaze persists even without the group to do the looking—just as the male gaze persists in film even when the film is watched by someone who does not identify as male. We must take apart the whole model.

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,