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Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping
Top of the pile
78
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
96/100Critics
44/100Scholars
94/100Author:
Matthew Salesses
Publisher:
Catapult Books
Date:
January 19, 2021
A manifesto and practical guide which challenges current models of craft and the writing workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers, and how cultural expectations inform storytelling.
What The Reviewers Say
In this new book, he dismantles a number of assumptions that underpin the teaching of craft in workshops. For example, students are often advised to choose striking details—what John Gardner called 'the lifeblood of fiction'—and leave out others that are too familiar. The trouble is that what stands out to, say, a disabled white character will be different from what stands out to a Black trans character, which will in turn be different from what stands out to an undocumented character. Minority students may be told to scrap what is striking to them in favor of what is striking to the dominant perspectives of their workshops, which Salesses points out are overwhelmingly white and cisgender. As a result, the students’ artistic choices may be stifled rather than nurtured.
... salient and instructive.
But this book also should be essential reading for others in the publishing industry seeking to understand how we marginalize, neglect, or discredit writers going against dominant and institutionalized western literary traditions. What things do we already know to be true? On some level, we’ve always known, though we may have struggled to find the right language to articulate it, that craft has never been about neutral, objective techniques. Instead, it is about — as Salesses unpacks them here — history, race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and more. And about how all of these play into power, vulnerability, value systems, privileges, agency, expectations, biases, assumptions, choices, imperialism, and colonization of craft standards just as they do in our lives.
A fresh view of teaching craft to writers of diverse backgrounds.
