Book Review: Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses

If fiction is, as Neil Gaiman asserts, “a lie that tells us the truth over and over again,” shouldn’t we ask how these pretty little liars do the paradoxical?  This is the question that Matthew Salesses answers in his book, Craft in the Real World. He explores the choices that writers make and how and why those choices might be different. I would go so far as to say, he explores how and why those choices should be different.

Salesses’s divides Craft in the Real World into two sections: Fiction in the Real World, and Workshop in the Real World. His main concern is how the fiction workshop, a staple of creative writing education, functions and what students are taught there. He gives a brief analysis of the typical writers’ workshop, promulgated by the famed Iowa Writers Workshop. In this paradigm, the writer is instructed to be silent while other students discuss their work. Salesses points out that this workshop is cold war construction which assumes a great deal about the writer’s aims, audience, and choices. It was not meant to hold more diverse workshop participants’ work or those writers themselves. “Fiction in the Real World” consists of sixteen sections, the majority of which are redefinitions of craft terms. “Workshop in the Real World” consists of seven sections that challenge the ideas underpinning the typical creative writing workshop. I’d be remiss if I did not point out that Salesses’s work does not solely rail against the writing workshop as it is currently understood. Instead, Salesses offers up a set of equity-based ideas that transform and empower writers to make choices.

I was struck by how Salesses asks writers to reconsider what they have learned in creative writing workshops. Let us look at his assertions about audience. He points out that typical workshop critique might condition a writer to believe that their audience consists of the people in the workshop. If we were to account for the author’s understanding of their own audience, authors would not have to explain certain choices: for example, they would not have to identify or explain certain customs like bonnet wearing, hot combs, or jumping to put on jeans. These are actually my examples, but you get my point. The audience that needs these things explained is not the intended audience, the implied readers. In fact, the act of explaining pushes the implied readers out of a text because it signals that the writer is interested in courting readers who do not know the references.

Given how Salesses upturns the primary formal education tool of creative writing, I was curious about how Salesses would empower writers to make choices about storytelling. He debunks the idea that pure craft exists. He writes, “craft is not innocent or neutral. When I participate in the sharing and changing of craft, I can only do so by acknowledging my own attraction to certain cultural conventions. Culture stands behind what makes many craft moves ‘work’ or not, and for whom they work” (emphasis in text). The idea of ‘pure craft’ suggests that the way we tell stories is culturally neutral. We know it is not. Attach craft firmly to the world in which it exists. Acknowledge the cultural conventions at the heart of your choices.

Salesses uses examples from Asian and Asian American writing to question concepts like tone, character arc, story arc, and relatability. I was most struck by his definition of “setting.” He writes, “setting is about what is noticed” (emphasis in text). This was mind blowing for me, especially as a sensitivity reader. When fiction writers ask me how to better write multiply marginalized characters or academic writers how to best represent and/or analyze multiply marginalized people groups, I have consistently said, “If you have been taught to write what you know, this requires you to know more and know what you know differently.” Salesses gives me another angle: that is, writing multiply marginalized characters requires that you notice more and notice what you’ve been trained to notice differently.

An example: When I enter a room as a cisgendered, straight, Black, disabled woman. Wait. Let me back up. If I can enter a room, I notice certain aspects of the room from my perspective as a cisgendered, straight, Black, disabled woman. I note where I can enter the space physically, where I can leave in case of an emergency. I note whether people are behaving aggressively and calculate whether that affects my safety. I note the demography of the room in terms of gender, race, disability, and sexuality. I note what I cannot know. If this is a court room, this noticing plays out differently. If this is a party, this noticing plays out differently. During COVID, this noticing pans out differently.

After reading Salesses’s book, I would be remiss if I were to insinuate that the above example was the only way to write cisgendered, straight, Black, disabled women characters or discuss us in an academic setting. There are certainly many other facets to my personhood and personality and those would definitely affect my perspective. To be fair, in some writing, I have not necessarily seen writers even grapple with the fact of noticing, let alone the specificity of noticing. All too often, I read characters of color (this is just one example) thrown into a white world and treated like, to borrow a phrase from George Schuyler, “lamp blacked Anglo Saxons.” The writing exercises at the back of Salesses’s book offer a useful in-road for fiction writers looking for a corrective. In addition to Salesses’s work, a writer may also find research helpful. Octavia E. Butler read biography, news, academic work, biology, history, and other fiction.

I deeply appreciate what Salesses has done, this gift of Craft in the Real World, so that writers might create work for the real world.