JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #63
August 5, 2021
I wrote here about a year ago how all craft advice stems from an underlying philosophy about what fiction is or should be, and I think I should write a bit more about that. The basic idea is that we can interrogate all writing advice to find out what the underlying premises are that motivate it. For instance, the advice to show rather than tell seems to arise from the premise that fiction should provide an experience. Hence, providing clear details that "show" us a fictional situation are more conducive to creating a compelling experience than merely "telling" us the outlines of that experience. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but you get the point.
Usually when we analyze someone’s writing, in the offering of feedback or critique, in judgment of their technique, or in admiration of the effectiveness of their prose, our analysis will point to speculations on craft, and those speculations will be grounded in some underlying philosophy, whether we acknowledge this or not. It’s easy to criticize certain published writers for being bad at craft if we’re judging them according to a philosophy of fiction that they are not in fact adherents of.
We can draw a distinction between a good story and good writing, and publishers sometimes buy good stories without much concern for the writing. There are unending examples. Here, the underlying philosophy that seems to inform their judgment is related to the compelling turns of the story, not how well-crafted the experience of reading is. In the best cases, a good story is also written to bring about a good experience, but this need not be so, at least, it seems, for some editors who are keen to make a million dollars selling bad writing that nevertheless provides a good story. Sometimes the good story isn’t even the one in the book, but is the author’s story about how the book came to be. And the publishers seem to be right, since they easily make those millions on fiction that does not adhere at all to ordinary standards of craft.
There is no moral compulsion that should rank one kind of storytelling over the other, and I, for myself, am not convinced that market forces are actually capable of making this kind of distinction (or many others that are left to the blind caprice of aggregate human activity). It’s possible that workshops, books about writing, editors speaking in the abstract, and other sources of craft advice are all focused on the wrong thing. Maybe honing our prose-craft is secondary to honing a compelling story, and the craft of storytelling is a different thing than the craft of fictive prose. And maybe the joining of the two is a third concern, some other kind of craft altogether. The possibilities certainly seem worth exploring. I think I’ll come back to these ideas in future Ruminations.