In a 2019 Kenyon Review interview, Matthew Salesses was asked about what he hoped his then-upcoming book, Craft in the Real World, would accomplish. He replied, “I hope it helps people who need a way of talking about things that on some level they already know to be true.”
Which people? Writers — especially those from underrepresented communities — and creative writing instructors mainly. 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.
In the first half of the book, Salesses offers precise language with which to engage with craft in the same intentional manner that we grapple with all of these things in actual life. He does this via a thorough deconstruction of received wisdom and popular notions about plot, character, world-building, narrative structure, style, theme, point of view, setting, voice, tone, pacing, beginnings, endings, and more. With examples from non-western literary traditions, he presents diverse storytelling approaches and describes how to include them in our literary spaces.
As we know, many of these literary spaces are still largely straight, white, cis, able. Even spaces that may appear diverse often conform to that straight-white-cis-able gaze. Salesses reminds us that it is because craft, as a set of standardized and teachable tools and techniques, is also about who gets to create those standards, why and how. Whether and how a writer is “good” (that is, conforming to or complying with particular craft standards) has more to do with the writer’s place in the culture that creates and maintains those standards than it does with the writer’s actual skills. So, for the writer not wanting to conform to or comply with such craft standards, Salesses provides much guidance.
Two key pieces of advice stand out. The first is to push back, not simply against the standards but against the context that created them: “Workshop has created many axioms: ‘show, don’t tell,’ ‘write what you know,’ ‘kill your darlings,’ etc. Writers have pushed back against those axioms, but we must also push back against the context that creates them, that nurtures them and passes them on.” Such pushback is possible only if we first work toward a deeper and wider knowledge of different ways of telling stories. This entails not only understanding the conventions of various literary traditions but also which exceptions and experiments might have influenced or changed them.
The second piece of advice is about determining the readership we’re writing for. Here, Salesses introduces his critical concept of two kinds of readers and two kinds of writers. First, there’s the reader-self that knows the fiction they’re reading is made up, not real. Then, there’s the implied reader: the self that experiences fictional characters as real people which is the one a writer is generally writing for. There’s also the author who creates and the implied author as imagined from the text by the reader. The author’s craft choices are not only negotiations with the cultural expectations of the implied reader, but they also determine the worldview or orientation of the implied author, the one the real reader gets to know through the text.
The latter half of the book is filled with practical strategies and approaches for writing instructors to turn the traditional workshop model on its head so that the author is centered rather than the critique; the process is addressed as much as or more than the product. There are also plenty of writing and revision exercises for the writer wanting to break away from prescribed craft standards and clarify their own aesthetics. All of these points speak to how much Salesses has gone beyond pedagogical principles to purposeful application. That the decentering of minority writers’ voices in the classroom may cause harmful personal consequences for those persons is not a new concern, now that such writers are more vocal about these effects. In the last decade, many essays have been published in prominent venues about the toxic aspects of MFA culture.
While Salesses has explored how workshop criticism, for an underrepresented writer, often veers from their craft toward their culture or identity, he only touches lightly on how that same critiquing mindset drives gatekeeping across the publishing ecosystem. He mentions how “the academic and publishing worlds constantly reinforce dominant norms by which books get published or celebrated, which writers get teaching jobs.” He also points to how translations and foreign classics “are often compared to the tradition of Western psychological realism (in it or not in it) rather than read within traditions of their own.” And he makes clear that it is “effectively a kind of colonization to assume that we all write for the same audience or that we should do so if we want our fiction to sell.”
However, he refrains from directly addressing ongoing publishing-related controversies like the highly common response of gatekeepers and tastemakers — agents, editors, book critics, and literary award judges — about not being “in love” with an underrepresented writer’s work or how such writers are often paid much less. Clearly, these issues are not squarely within the book’s stated remit of challenging accepted models of creative writing craft and workshop. Yet, almost everything Salesses discusses here is also relevant to such issues. If we are to approach reading, crafting, and workshopping differently, as Salesses exhorts us so compellingly, that also ought to change how gatekeepers approach publication decisions, literary criticism, and prize-giving. Perhaps this will require additional interrogations to address the challenges therein. Perhaps they will need to be undertaken by gatekeeping professionals who are as forthright, insightful, and unafraid to upend industry norms as Matthew Salesses has proved to be with his writing thus far, of which this book is an impressive milestone.
[Published by Catapult on January 19, 2021, 256 pages, $16.95 paperback original]
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