JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #83
January 20, 2022
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how writing workshops function, and one thing that keeps coming to mind is how the past seventy or so years has surfeited us with fiction-writing manuals and advice, little mnemonic adages that we can memorize in order to learn everything we ever needed to know about fiction writing. This is a wonderful thing, opening up the world of creative writing to many more people by offering easy guidelines to get started. Long ago, aspiring writers had to read widely and analyze what they read in order to ascertain what techniques worked and what did not. But the fact that we can now get this advice without having to figure it all out ourselves removes us from that very thing that most likely inspired us to be writers in the first place. As much as we can learn from a workshop or fiction manuals or some guy ruminating about craft on Facebook, it’s important to remember to make time to read a lot of fiction, to rediscover techniques that haven’t quite been put into the manuals.