Craft in the real world: rethinking fiction writing and workshopping
Author
Publisher
Catapult
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Varies, see individual formats and editions
Language
English
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Description
This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review).The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces? Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, "When we write fiction, we write the world."
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Both Matthew Salesses and Charles Yu write thought-provoking, nonlinear, humorous stories with speculative elements, realistic literary fiction, and nonfiction books that focus on Asian Americans, racism, and the creative arts. Matthew Salesses' surrealist psychological satire and Charles Yu's science fiction stories both typically feature likeable, flawed, and introspective male Asian characters as the central characters. -- Alicia Cavitt
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Published Reviews
Kirkus Book Review
A fresh view of teaching craft to writers of diverse backgrounds. Korean-born novelist and essayist Salesses, who teaches Asian American literature as well as creative writing, offers a thoughtful analysis of the teaching of craft in colleges and writing programs. "Craft," he observes, "is the history of which kind of stories have typically held power--and for whom--so it also is the history of which stories have typically been omitted." He argues persuasively that the widespread practice of silencing the writer while workshop members critique a piece of writing normalizes White, middle-class, Western values. As an MFA student, he recalls, "I still remember being banned from speaking while mostly white writers discussed my race." This pedagogy conveys to a writer who does not share the reader's race, ethnicity, class, or gender that their story is not worth telling. Those who are silenced learn "that in order to speak they must speak with an acceptable voice" and that their story "must be framed so that the majority can read via their own lens." Salesses offers a detailed overview of the main points covered in writing workshops--including tone, plot, conflict, character arc, setting, pacing, and structure--which generally use realist fiction by White male writers as models. These stories "present the world as a matter of free will. The problems are caused by the self and can be solved by the development of the self. And somehow both external and internal conflict is like this." Salesses counters that view with an illuminating chapter on East Asian and Asian American fiction, where he points to 10 ways that Chinese fiction is different from Western tradition, and he offers an innovative syllabus and exercises. "It is effectively a kind of colonization," he writes astutely, "to assume that we all write for the same audience or that we should do so if we want our fiction to sell." An insightful guide for readers, writers, and instructors from all walks of life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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