Why Craft Books
I’ll never forget the cackle of laughter. It rang out like the horn of a big rig. My colleague was responding to my statement that I was reading June Casagrande’s It was the best of sentences; it was the worst of sentences. Much like the compression that makes big rig sounds loud and rumbling, his laughter exploded with derision and surprise.
“Of course, you – the English professor – is reading a book on grammar,” he snorted, “I’d expect nothing else.” The sneer in his tone made very little sense to me. Why would I, as a writer, forgo the opportunity to learn about the most basic unit of my craft: the sentence? But, I, doused in the cold water of my own embarrassment, said nothing.
I revisit that moment every time my eye lands on Casagrande’s book. My embarrassment has long since been replaced by a slightly smug triumph. Reading craft books about writing has made me a better writer and editor.
Take Casagrande’s book, for example: Before I read it, I found myself frustrated at sentence level editing because it felt so persnickety. It conjured memories of sitting in a 200-level linguistics course as an undergraduate, failing to correctly map sentences. Or, coming into the same linguistics class having read and feeling confident in what I thought I knew, only to have a convoluted lecture destroy my sense of surety. Casagrande’s book quite patiently describes and analyzes the sentence for its possibilities and limitations. I can now think about a sentence level edit without feeling flustered.
I have an entire shelf on my bookcase dedicated to craft books. Among them, of course, is They Say / I Say by Graff and Birkenstein, Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form (which isn’t little at all), Phil Metres’s The Sound of Listening (it feels like a craft book to me); Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World, manuals about prosody, edited collections with writers on writing including This is How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill edited by Darlene Taylor and the indomitable, Jericho Brown. While I cannot truthfully say I agree with or even follow all the advice, I am certainly a better writer and editor for having read it.
I sought out craft books because the academy does not necessarily teach us how to write well. We learn by repetition, figuring out our style, and reading other people’s work. That is helpful to a degree. It is even more helpful when you receive thorough feedback and guidance on how to implement that feedback. However, I found myself floundering when thinking about the structure of an argument, the utility of a sentence, the best way to use punctuation, and a variety of other writing questions that felt idiosyncratic, but no less important. I sought guidance from fiction writers, creative non-fiction essayists, and poets because that writing relies on energy and must cultivate good will with a reader. As Roxane Gay has noted, “we cultivate our audience on the page.”
I recently said to a student that if you elevate your reading, your thinking will follow, and, after that, your writing. The cycle repeats. Consider this my humble plea for you to read a craft book. Be part of a community of writers.