Earlier this year, I wrote some of my hot takes from Roxane Gay's MasterClass on Writing for Social Change, which, soit dit en passant, I still totally recommend checking out. This month, after listening to my first audiobook ever and unnerved at my most recent book order turning up late, I tried the Kindle app. I have a new phone with a bigger screen so the e-book experience hasn't been as painful as I anticipated. Is it my favorite? No, but it saves me months of anxious longing for books that never show up. Because I've been attempting to refine my writing chops, I got myself Matthew Salesses’ critically lauded Craft in The Real World to see what the hype was all about. After all, Roxane Gay swears by it and since her MasterClass was nothing short of life-changing, I trust her.
Here are some of the things I learned.
There is no ‘pure craft’ and what's ‘normal’ largely depends on who's in power
The argument that one should know the rules before breaking them is really an argument about who gets to make the rules […]
Page 6
For writers who have pursued (or intend to pursue) MFAs in creative writing (often in the West), there is an assumption that they will learn ~craft~. As if craft is a singular, universal concept that exists in an acultural void. Salesses reminds us that writing norms (and norms of all kinds really) are sets of cultural expectations and their perceived universality has more to do with how diligently they are presented as standard and by whom. For instance, I learned that Iowa’s celebrated Writers’ Workshop - the first MFA program of its kind, which, to this day, is still considered by many the best graduate writing program in the US - was created for and by white men (as is the case with many things) and that this invariably impacts the kind of craft it teaches and the bar it sets. What is presented as normal is usually normative, and best serves whomsoever set the standard to begin with.
Ambiguity around race benefits whiteness
Salesses points out that usually, when a character’s race isn’t explicitly stated, they’re assumed to be white. That when their gender isn’t specified, we assume they’re male (something Salesses averts by using she/her/hers to refer to ‘the writer’, expertly proving this point when that choice doesn’t go unnoticed). He notes that most characters whose race/gender/sexual orientation/etc. is mentioned are usually not straight, white, cis or male and that specifying race only when characters aren’t white, effectively standardizes whiteness.
If fiction dictates that a writer identify only the race of non-white characters, then craft is a tool used to normalize whiteness.
Page XIV
Know who your audience is and write to it
Throughout the book, Salesses talks at length about the notion of an ‘implied audience’. He deconstructs the concept of ‘the reader’ - often perceived as a neutral, universal audience - saying that this so-called reader, when deliberately unspecific, is more often that not assumed to be white, middle-class, able, cis, het and male. Much like characters. He recommends scrapping the notion of ‘finding an audience’ and instead, suggests writing towards an intended audience. This reminded me of the literary overhaul I went through in 2020. I had never known that as an Indo-Mauritian Canadian woman of immigrant parents I could have been a writer’s intended reader. That I could be exactly who an author would want to connect with. That I didn’t have to be disappear into white norms to be palatable as a character, as an audience and as a writer. This broadened the field of possibilities for me and although many of the writers I read get published in the West, reading Indigenous, queer, Brown and Black stories has helped me understand that appealing to an assumed white audience is not only unnecessary but also unfeasible without upholding whiteness.
It is effectively a kind of colonization to assume that we will all write for the same audience or that we should do so if we want our fiction to sell.
Page 120
If you don’t understand something, it likely wasn’t written for you and that’s okay
We might feel like a work of fiction, or any piece of art for that matter, needs to have ‘universal appeal’, that our ability to understand or relate to it will determine whether it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art. I remember feeling this way about Aya Nakamura’s Djadja. While watching the music video on YouTube, I scrolled through the comment section. Many of the reactions echoed my own; we didn’t understand. It needed deciphering, and that made it something to make fun of. I scrolled and scrolled until I saw a comment saying something along the lines of ‘if you don’t understand maybe it’s because it wasn’t created for you’. If when embracing a personal understanding of craft, a writer makes choices a mainstream audience (again, often assumed to be white, middle-class, cis and het) doesn’t understand, this says little about how ‘good’ of a writer they are and a lot more about who their intended audience is.
To say a work of fiction is unrelatable is to say, “I am not the implied audience, so I refuse to engage with the choices the author has made.”
Page 75
As writers (especially writers of color), we owe it to our intended audiences (and to our work) to challenge mislabeled ideas of craft, ideals which often make us funnel our creativity through the approving lens of whiteness. It would be wise to question how we engage with perceived universality and to reframe cultural norms as possibility rather than prescription.