I’m not sure when I began noticing this, but for five years, maybe more, I haven’t been able to trust the new releases at my local bookstore as touchstones for my own writing life.
Josh, when I say you raise perennial questions, I don't mean to say at all that they're not particularly vital now. Quite the contrary. There have been lots of smart observations here. I'll offer my own thoughts along some of their lines.
We know craft and art are not the same thing. We need craft to create the art, and there's art to the craft, but we craft the simply popular too. We need craft to achieve popular success. The art and the popular can converge, but if what determines the craft is a drive toward the popular rather than some aesthetic the writer considers art -- what's "popular" with him or herself -- then that's going to change the nature of the craft and produce different writing.
What I think is different now from the past is the nexus of art, academia, and cultural politics. In the past these areas were not necessarily operating in conjunction with each other at all -- often, they were at odds. Now, they mutually reinforce each other and share the same language. This grows as a detriment to the language, the writing, and the culture of both. The power centers of publishing and artistic notoriety are in some respects different from the past, which is good, but no less hegemonic than in the past, which isn't. But we need to recognize that many of the great achievements in literature that we honor from earlier eras were not published as equivalents of today's agented book deal.
Something else is at work that touches on these matters -- the commercial conjoining and cooption of all these elements. How much do we recognize any more a hip (hop), beat, counter-cultural, bohemian, avant garde alternative to the popular and commercially validated in art? I think this is nowhere more a question than in music and fashion -- where the cred of street culture became validated in mass popular culture -- but it applies to the writing world, too. In relation to Substack, everybody who types words on the platform is "a writer," and the measure of success is subscription numbers and the higher measure paid subscriptions.
Smart discourse, as always, Jay -- thank you. This is true: "What I think is different now from the past is the nexus of art, academia, and cultural politics. In the past these areas were not necessarily operating in conjunction with each other at all -- often, they were at odds. Now, they mutually reinforce each other and share the same language."
If numbers are the measures of success then we're not talking about aesthetic achievements, which I think is what I'm after. As you say, craft and art aren't the same, but craft aims at art. I suppose I don't know how to write any other way.
That is so kind of you to include my book among ones that are so admirable. Thank you!
It's funny, I had coffee yesterday with a writer I've only recently met, and he was asking about Substack and afterward I thought what more I wanted to say to his question about quality, which is that it almost feels like quality has to be a choice here because not everything has it but that doesn't seem to matter much. (A friend of mine says that nobody actually reads and it's all a personality cult but I can't go as far as to say that's the norm.)
I wonder if it's similar with the rest of writing. I've read several disappointing books in the last few years, enough to make me more wary, and it's not even the writers as much as it is the lack of editing and editorial support. Editing is how most of us learn to write well, and a lot of publishers just don't seem to be investing in writers that way anymore.
Joe Wilkins's "The Entire Sky" brought me back to realizing how much of a difference it makes to me when this storytelling thing is done *well*. As did reading your memoir! Maybe it doesn't matter to everyone. But to this reader it makes a difference.
Yes, maybe it's a more a matter of finding readers for whom high-level craft matters. I've never had a sustained relationship with an editor, either, though I've had a taste of it at a few magazines. It is perhaps telling that Benjamin Dreyer is recently retired; I'm not sure an editor with his sensibility would make much headway now. Yet his "Dreyer's English" is beloved! So perhaps the pendulum will swing back toward that kind of rigor and close attention to sentences.
"It is strange to feel, in mid-life, that the target you’ve been aiming at for years has moved, is still moving, that most of your salient reference points are now ten, twenty years old." I feel this deeply.
I'd recommend both! Although I'm wondering now if "Wonder Boys" would land the same as it did the first time around. It does rather emphasize the white male saturation in publishing in the late 20th century. Quite an about face in "American Fiction."
As for your first comment, I should hasten to say that it's not because I haven't followed new releases or am just falling back on my familiar material. It's probably a combination of the world changing and the literary scene drifting from my own sensibility. But it's similar to the hustle culture on Substack. I find that if that's how the game is played now, I'm not sure I want to play? Unresolved questions...
I very much enjoyed the Wonder Boys film adaptation. Dylan won an Oscar for the song he wrote for the film, with a title that’s perhaps significant to this discussion: “Things Have Changed.”
The stalled writer feels like kind of a trope, though. In the excellent 1988 remake of D.O.A. with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, Quaid plays a blocked novelist/English professor who is trying to solve his own murder (slow-acting poison) and in true novelist fashion, equates it with writer’s block: “They didn’t kill me; I was dead already.” A classic line in a classic modern film noir.
Set at Christmas around UT-Austin, that’s another trope: a film’s crisis occurring during what should be a festive time (as Wonder Boys takes place during a literary festival).
I think now I'm even more curious about "Wonder Boys" haha.
Yes, I always wanted to be a writer, but when I found out how the game was played I turned to zines/self-publishing/substack. Now I can play on my own terms, it just might mean no one reads it/knows it exists. You pay one way or another, I guess.
Your line “like thousands of players running their own private home run derbies, hoping to draw a crowd” is a good description of Substack. I wonder if another way of looking at Substack is to go back a century or more to P. G. Wodehouse’s little essay, “The Alarming Spread of Poetry,” where he jokes about how the advent of free verse like Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River was threatening to create “a nation of minor poets” attracted by the chance to make money writing verse. That would seem to be an apt metaphor for the Substack Gold Rush — creating, as it were, a nation of minor league players.
This is the perennial question of whether Flannery O'Connor was right when she said, “Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
There's a certain snobbery implied by that -- and by Wodehouse's essay. I would never have become a professor at all if there weren't room for minor leaguers (I never claimed to be global expert, though I do have some niche expertise in Willa Cather). Minor leaguers are also professionals, I might point out. All of them were standouts at one stage of their development. So that's not necessarily a pejorative metaphor. I would be perfectly happy being a minor leaguer if I felt that the rules and structure of the game made sense, or if there were some objective way of feeling that I had clear targets, other than identity markers or market-friendly content.
So where does Substack fit? Now you have me wondering which athletic paradigm fits best. Certainly there's a corollary in the NIL deals among college athletes (the rich get richer, the average player gets nothing). If you're a star before Substack, you'll be a star on the platform. Maybe there are some "walk-on" writers who break through, but not many. If the literary system were more like the minor leagues, which I think are more meritocratic than NIL, I think I'd be OK with that.
Poets and poetry were often sources of humor in Wodehouse’s books, so at one level his essay is consistent with that. But I also can’t help but feel he’s lamenting the loss of reverence for a kind of craft, that of meter and rhyme, in favor of poetry that seemed both easier to write and more lucrative. His line about chopping prose into bits is criticism I hear today about poetry almost word for word, as though we still fall back to talking about poetry’s loss of cultural footprint in terms of nostalgia.
Pop music now plays many of the roles once reserved for poetry, and this transition was in part the result of technology: the freeing of music from recital hall and barn dance to a recorded form available almost anytime and anywhere. Perhaps some forms of prose writing are undergoing a loss of prestige due to technology. It’s naive of us to have ever imagined that a ubiquitous internet would leave most institutions alone and be limited to making the delivery of certain familiar goods and boring services more efficient and maybe give rise to a one-off obvious application like streaming.
And like with poetry, maybe we still don’t have a way of talking about this shift. All we know is that readers don’t want some of the old forms as much anymore.
Yes, I suppose the older shift to free verse is relevant here. In that case there would be new forms rising from the present time that would cohere as benchmarks of aesthetic achievement. With the lack of any curation other than mass web traffic and payments, I'm not sure I see that as possible.
Music is an interesting comparison. Someone like Sturgill Simpson shares my view, I think. He has a particular sensibility and vision that is not terribly market friendly, even though it is innovative and influential in its own way. Someone like Luke Combs (sticking with country) is a master of marketing, even though I find his lyrics hollow and his melodies formulaic. I do love his cover of "Traci Chapman," but in a way that illustrates the point about superior craft -- not one of his songs rises to the level of that one, and it was his skill as a performer that took it to new heights.
For optimism, I recommend re-reading. I'm reading the Mantel trilogy for the second time and enjoying it and appreciating it more. I think it will still be read decades from now. And I think i'll probably read ti a third time at some point.
Another great essay on a topic that I've been pondering. Naomi Kanakia has been expressing the same sentiments on her substack, and also very eloquently. It feels like a consensus is building among writers that the craft of writing has been abandoned as a criteria for publication, when it should be the only criterion. I wonder if a new movement could start out of this?
Thanks, Sean. Yes, I've seen some of Naomi's posts. Whether there is a consensus building among writers writ large or just among writers on Substack is perhaps another question.
As a young person and writer, I have a hard time discerning what might be considered "great" writing. I'm getting better at it, but it doesn't feel like a skill I was taught (or maybe I was taught but neglected to learn on my own part). I don't know if I have any great conclusions from this, other than maybe we need to adjust the *how* of teaching craft?
Thanks for reading, Macey. I think part of my point is that there isn't any consensus about greatness anymore. It's always been a matter of debate, and writers have always gone through cycles of falling out of favor and being rediscovered by another generation of critics. But I think it's really all about market share right now. Some publishers take more chances on debut novels, but with the consolidation of the imprints into the Power 5, there's less room for real innovation. Those systemic realities then trickle back into how creative writing is taught (because MFA programs want their graduates to get book contracts with the Power 5).
Maybe that's a little afield of your comment? I'd like to hear more about what your writing apprenticeship has looked like so far, how you've begun to form your own aesthetic judgments, and what past models (if any) those are based on? My formative influences were Willa Cather and my mentor, Ted Kooser. There were many writers in the 1990s who shaped my sensibility, as well: Tobias Wolff (who was in turn shaped by Raymond Carver), Kim Barnes, Patricia Hampl, many others. To explain what I mean by craft, I'd probably have to cite examples from them (as I do in today's essay on my personal site).
Thank you for this thoughtful response! I didn’t go to grad school, and my undergrad was focused more on journalism than creative writing, so it’s been a slow process of building my own apprenticeship - which I never thought to use that word until now. I do wonder if I missed out on some of the skills I wish I had by not doing an MFA, but I’m not sure.
Some writing that really sticks out to me and that I return to: Roxane Gay, Melissa Febos, Brandon Taylor, Saeed Jones, Maggie Nelson. I found Jeannine Ouelette’s “writing in the dark” substack this year and find her craft advice helpful, but I’m still playing around with how that manifests in my own work. I currently have a day job in nonprofit marketing, and it’s hard for me to separate that voice from my own at this point in my career.
All that is to say I’m very much in an exploratory stage of all of this and trying to learn as much as I can.
Hi Joshua, I'm interested in this subject as I've studied craft in both an MFA and in Suzanne Kingsbury's Gateless Writing program, where I love that she asserts "writers need craft, not opinion."
However, perhaps one of my biggest stumbling blocks with the idea of "literary" writing/books, is that often I do not ENJOY reading them. And personally, I like to enjoy both reading and writing. I wonder if this is a difference between the sexes - I've read how historically male writers believed one needed to slit one's wrist and "bleed on the page" to write. Yeah, nah. Not for me.
If solid use of craft makes a book more engaging and enjoyable to read, then I'm all for it. But sometimes I feel like a "literary" book can be a bit like the Emperor's new clothes.
Perhaps this is a matter of personal taste and preference. Perhaps I simply enjoy reading memoirs like WHEN BREAT BECOMES AIR by Paul Kalanithi, that get both 'literary' and commercial acclaim.
How interesting, Camilla. Yeah, there probably is some intersection between socialization and craft sensibility. Hemingway and Faulkner being one extreme, perhaps, and Sarah Orne Jewett another. But I don't think Willa Cather (my literary hero) wrote to be intentionally difficult. Her craft manifesto "On Writing" is all about removing barriers, simplifying aesthetics, avoiding explication in favor of suggestion. That's much closer to my sensibility.
Where I think I might quarrel with Kingsbury is in asking where craft comes from, if not from deeply held opinions about aesthetics? This is kind of like my former students who wanted to "just write" and not bother much with reading. Cather's Thea Kronborg confesses to her childhood mentor that there is such a thing as "creative hate" -- a contempt for mediocrity. That is typically thin ice to walk out on these days.
I'm curious if you have examples of literary works that fell flat for you? I agree with you that pretentiousness doesn't help much. My mentor was Ted Kooser, so I've been rather steeped in simplicity rather than baroque plots and intellectual ornamentation. Anthony Doerr's "Cloud, Cuckoo, Land" has some of that overcooked quality, I've heard. Kingsolver's "Demon Copperhead" didn't hold me, either, but I perhaps should give it another try. Chard Harbach's "The Art of Fielding" was another very overhyped book, in my opinion. But that is the tricky thing about craft -- it does require us to have aesthetic opinions!
Thanks for your thoughtful response Joshua. And thank you for telling me about Willa Cather's craft manifesto "On Writing." I will check it out as I'm interested in the ideas of, "removing barriers" and "simplifying aesthetics."
But in considering 'explication' as, "the process of analyzing and developing an idea or principle in detail," I'm not sure I'd be on board with "avoiding explication in favor of suggestion,” as I truly enjoy writing that explores and investigates ideas and principles in detail.
Also, perhaps with Creative Nonfiction, for me it boils down to content. Perhaps you can have the best craft in the world, but if I’m not interested in the content, the writing will not usually keep me engaged.
My personal preferences are authors who some may put in a “spiritual” category, but in essence the writing is about one's state of consciousness or evolution of consciousness. Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, Tosha Silver, Sidra Stone...
I've also been enjoying the contemporary creative non-fiction English writers, Katherine May (Wintering, and Enchantment) and Beth Kempton (The Way of the Fearless Writer, and Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived.) And I really enjoyed the Canadian writer, Glynnis MacNicol’s book, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris. And of course there’s the classic Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass — I love that this had been published 10 years before it hit the NYT bestseller list. And Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted, another grass roots bestseller. And a memoir I found deeply inspirational recently is Cristina Moon’s Three Years on the Great Mountain.
When you write, "But that is the tricky thing about craft — it does require us to have aesthetic opinions!" Perhaps we need to define what we mean by craft — and I'm taking it that your definition of craft goes beyond craft elements such as, narrative arc, character development, lyrical sentences, conflict in story, scene and chapter construction, setting a reader in time and place, beginnings and desire, structure and scaffolding, description and details, juxtaposition, rhythm, etc.
p.s. I see below that you have written, "The way I still try to teach craft (as in my essay today over on my personal site) is very much the latter. It's removing the barriers between readers and the writer, enabling a kind of telepathy, sustaining a reading dream that is also in some way instructive and transcendent. It probably requires a more elegant definition than that!"
Kimmerer's book is indeed a gem. I don't know the story about how it was discovered, but I'm glad it was. Perhaps that is the best answer to the question of craft: to do one's work quietly and well, and let fate take care of the rest.
I think I'd need my own craft book to answer your last question fully. Here are a few places where I've attempted to define particular craft techniques.
I suspect that the ‘artisan writing’ you aspire to has simply become drowned in the marketing of author-as-consumer product…MFA programs also have created a massive oversupply of writers with artisan standards out of all correlation with any absolute growth in this kind of reader. It’s analogous to academia itself. Oversupply of folks with extremely high standards…but declining demand for them. A society predicated on radical, aspirational autonomy easily mismatches artistic supply with demand for art. The question to ask is: is it not better to have emotional impact on more people than to maximize artisan quality? My answer eventually became yes…broader impact is more satisfying…
That's an interesting way of framing it, James. The MFA boom has complicated things, perhaps the way the GI Bill did before that.
But I don't agree with your framing of artisan standards and demand. For craft to be real and endure, it must exist separately from the marketplace. Sure, I'm wringing my hands about the lack of market appeal for literary work (that's Monk Ellison's dilemma). But reframing craft in terms of scale requires overhauling the whole value system. It's not craft then, not in the way that transcends generations.
So I think the essential question to ask is how to align the "why" of writing with a platform or community that shares that value system. I'm still on the fence about whether Substack does that for me. I have not written a new longform essay in two years, partly because of personal upheaval and partly because I'm trying to turn out quality posts once or twice a week. Some people can make that weekly or bimonthly cycle feed a book project, and that's probably up to me to figure out. But part of me would also like to retire to solitude for a while and come back with something more fully-formed. What stops me is the question of whether there's anyplace left to bring a manuscript like that. Reaching the masses at scale, as you know, means feeding the feed to stay relevant--and hopefully writing the other, longer thing, at the same time.
Ah, I think that's a false binary. At least, Horace's ancient dictum was that literature ought to both instruct and delight. I've taught my share of "classics" that were a chore to read. But I really don't think a literary sensibility has to be obscure. That is perhaps another way that the Academy has muddied craft for us.
The way I still try to teach craft (as in my essay today over on my personal site) is very much the latter. It's removing the barriers between readers and the writer, enabling a kind of telepathy, sustaining a reading dream that is also in some way instructive and transcendent. It probably requires a more elegant definition than that!
Great piece Josh. This captures so much of my thought process - this feeling that something is really going wrong with the industry and that what the industry regards as quality is very different from what you or I would regard as quality.
Thanks, Sam. Whether my own definition of quality matters in any objective sense is another question. And I'm still struggling with that idea of us all trying to get people to watch our private home run derbies. There's a paradox here in that we were introduced to writing as a craft, as an art form, through fairly traditional means -- through reading, through "the classics," through classroom instruction -- and so even though I think we need to assert our independence from those structures, we also have a duty to sustain them in some way. Or else where is the apprenticeship for the writer who comes after us? There is part of me that is very uneasy about just throwing the whole system out. It feels a little reckless, like tossing out all of the conventions about gender (as you've written about) or throwing caution to the wind regarding traditional families.
Josh, when I say you raise perennial questions, I don't mean to say at all that they're not particularly vital now. Quite the contrary. There have been lots of smart observations here. I'll offer my own thoughts along some of their lines.
We know craft and art are not the same thing. We need craft to create the art, and there's art to the craft, but we craft the simply popular too. We need craft to achieve popular success. The art and the popular can converge, but if what determines the craft is a drive toward the popular rather than some aesthetic the writer considers art -- what's "popular" with him or herself -- then that's going to change the nature of the craft and produce different writing.
What I think is different now from the past is the nexus of art, academia, and cultural politics. In the past these areas were not necessarily operating in conjunction with each other at all -- often, they were at odds. Now, they mutually reinforce each other and share the same language. This grows as a detriment to the language, the writing, and the culture of both. The power centers of publishing and artistic notoriety are in some respects different from the past, which is good, but no less hegemonic than in the past, which isn't. But we need to recognize that many of the great achievements in literature that we honor from earlier eras were not published as equivalents of today's agented book deal.
Something else is at work that touches on these matters -- the commercial conjoining and cooption of all these elements. How much do we recognize any more a hip (hop), beat, counter-cultural, bohemian, avant garde alternative to the popular and commercially validated in art? I think this is nowhere more a question than in music and fashion -- where the cred of street culture became validated in mass popular culture -- but it applies to the writing world, too. In relation to Substack, everybody who types words on the platform is "a writer," and the measure of success is subscription numbers and the higher measure paid subscriptions.
Just some thoughts on a Friday afternoon.
Smart discourse, as always, Jay -- thank you. This is true: "What I think is different now from the past is the nexus of art, academia, and cultural politics. In the past these areas were not necessarily operating in conjunction with each other at all -- often, they were at odds. Now, they mutually reinforce each other and share the same language."
If numbers are the measures of success then we're not talking about aesthetic achievements, which I think is what I'm after. As you say, craft and art aren't the same, but craft aims at art. I suppose I don't know how to write any other way.
That is so kind of you to include my book among ones that are so admirable. Thank you!
It's funny, I had coffee yesterday with a writer I've only recently met, and he was asking about Substack and afterward I thought what more I wanted to say to his question about quality, which is that it almost feels like quality has to be a choice here because not everything has it but that doesn't seem to matter much. (A friend of mine says that nobody actually reads and it's all a personality cult but I can't go as far as to say that's the norm.)
I wonder if it's similar with the rest of writing. I've read several disappointing books in the last few years, enough to make me more wary, and it's not even the writers as much as it is the lack of editing and editorial support. Editing is how most of us learn to write well, and a lot of publishers just don't seem to be investing in writers that way anymore.
Joe Wilkins's "The Entire Sky" brought me back to realizing how much of a difference it makes to me when this storytelling thing is done *well*. As did reading your memoir! Maybe it doesn't matter to everyone. But to this reader it makes a difference.
Yes, maybe it's a more a matter of finding readers for whom high-level craft matters. I've never had a sustained relationship with an editor, either, though I've had a taste of it at a few magazines. It is perhaps telling that Benjamin Dreyer is recently retired; I'm not sure an editor with his sensibility would make much headway now. Yet his "Dreyer's English" is beloved! So perhaps the pendulum will swing back toward that kind of rigor and close attention to sentences.
"It is strange to feel, in mid-life, that the target you’ve been aiming at for years has moved, is still moving, that most of your salient reference points are now ten, twenty years old." I feel this deeply.
Also, a couple good movies to check out it looks like!
I'd recommend both! Although I'm wondering now if "Wonder Boys" would land the same as it did the first time around. It does rather emphasize the white male saturation in publishing in the late 20th century. Quite an about face in "American Fiction."
As for your first comment, I should hasten to say that it's not because I haven't followed new releases or am just falling back on my familiar material. It's probably a combination of the world changing and the literary scene drifting from my own sensibility. But it's similar to the hustle culture on Substack. I find that if that's how the game is played now, I'm not sure I want to play? Unresolved questions...
I very much enjoyed the Wonder Boys film adaptation. Dylan won an Oscar for the song he wrote for the film, with a title that’s perhaps significant to this discussion: “Things Have Changed.”
The stalled writer feels like kind of a trope, though. In the excellent 1988 remake of D.O.A. with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, Quaid plays a blocked novelist/English professor who is trying to solve his own murder (slow-acting poison) and in true novelist fashion, equates it with writer’s block: “They didn’t kill me; I was dead already.” A classic line in a classic modern film noir.
Set at Christmas around UT-Austin, that’s another trope: a film’s crisis occurring during what should be a festive time (as Wonder Boys takes place during a literary festival).
I think now I'm even more curious about "Wonder Boys" haha.
Yes, I always wanted to be a writer, but when I found out how the game was played I turned to zines/self-publishing/substack. Now I can play on my own terms, it just might mean no one reads it/knows it exists. You pay one way or another, I guess.
Your line “like thousands of players running their own private home run derbies, hoping to draw a crowd” is a good description of Substack. I wonder if another way of looking at Substack is to go back a century or more to P. G. Wodehouse’s little essay, “The Alarming Spread of Poetry,” where he jokes about how the advent of free verse like Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River was threatening to create “a nation of minor poets” attracted by the chance to make money writing verse. That would seem to be an apt metaphor for the Substack Gold Rush — creating, as it were, a nation of minor league players.
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8190/pg8190-images.html#link2H_4_0010
This is the perennial question of whether Flannery O'Connor was right when she said, “Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
There's a certain snobbery implied by that -- and by Wodehouse's essay. I would never have become a professor at all if there weren't room for minor leaguers (I never claimed to be global expert, though I do have some niche expertise in Willa Cather). Minor leaguers are also professionals, I might point out. All of them were standouts at one stage of their development. So that's not necessarily a pejorative metaphor. I would be perfectly happy being a minor leaguer if I felt that the rules and structure of the game made sense, or if there were some objective way of feeling that I had clear targets, other than identity markers or market-friendly content.
So where does Substack fit? Now you have me wondering which athletic paradigm fits best. Certainly there's a corollary in the NIL deals among college athletes (the rich get richer, the average player gets nothing). If you're a star before Substack, you'll be a star on the platform. Maybe there are some "walk-on" writers who break through, but not many. If the literary system were more like the minor leagues, which I think are more meritocratic than NIL, I think I'd be OK with that.
Poets and poetry were often sources of humor in Wodehouse’s books, so at one level his essay is consistent with that. But I also can’t help but feel he’s lamenting the loss of reverence for a kind of craft, that of meter and rhyme, in favor of poetry that seemed both easier to write and more lucrative. His line about chopping prose into bits is criticism I hear today about poetry almost word for word, as though we still fall back to talking about poetry’s loss of cultural footprint in terms of nostalgia.
Pop music now plays many of the roles once reserved for poetry, and this transition was in part the result of technology: the freeing of music from recital hall and barn dance to a recorded form available almost anytime and anywhere. Perhaps some forms of prose writing are undergoing a loss of prestige due to technology. It’s naive of us to have ever imagined that a ubiquitous internet would leave most institutions alone and be limited to making the delivery of certain familiar goods and boring services more efficient and maybe give rise to a one-off obvious application like streaming.
And like with poetry, maybe we still don’t have a way of talking about this shift. All we know is that readers don’t want some of the old forms as much anymore.
Yes, I suppose the older shift to free verse is relevant here. In that case there would be new forms rising from the present time that would cohere as benchmarks of aesthetic achievement. With the lack of any curation other than mass web traffic and payments, I'm not sure I see that as possible.
Music is an interesting comparison. Someone like Sturgill Simpson shares my view, I think. He has a particular sensibility and vision that is not terribly market friendly, even though it is innovative and influential in its own way. Someone like Luke Combs (sticking with country) is a master of marketing, even though I find his lyrics hollow and his melodies formulaic. I do love his cover of "Traci Chapman," but in a way that illustrates the point about superior craft -- not one of his songs rises to the level of that one, and it was his skill as a performer that took it to new heights.
For optimism, I recommend re-reading. I'm reading the Mantel trilogy for the second time and enjoying it and appreciating it more. I think it will still be read decades from now. And I think i'll probably read ti a third time at some point.
Indeed -- anything that holds up a second or third time through is an excellent model! I'm late to Mantel, but this might be the nudge I need.
Really great essay, Joshua. Thank you!
Thanks Aaron!
Another great essay on a topic that I've been pondering. Naomi Kanakia has been expressing the same sentiments on her substack, and also very eloquently. It feels like a consensus is building among writers that the craft of writing has been abandoned as a criteria for publication, when it should be the only criterion. I wonder if a new movement could start out of this?
https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/the-literary-short-story-is-an-empty
Thanks, Sean. Yes, I've seen some of Naomi's posts. Whether there is a consensus building among writers writ large or just among writers on Substack is perhaps another question.
As a young person and writer, I have a hard time discerning what might be considered "great" writing. I'm getting better at it, but it doesn't feel like a skill I was taught (or maybe I was taught but neglected to learn on my own part). I don't know if I have any great conclusions from this, other than maybe we need to adjust the *how* of teaching craft?
Thanks for reading, Macey. I think part of my point is that there isn't any consensus about greatness anymore. It's always been a matter of debate, and writers have always gone through cycles of falling out of favor and being rediscovered by another generation of critics. But I think it's really all about market share right now. Some publishers take more chances on debut novels, but with the consolidation of the imprints into the Power 5, there's less room for real innovation. Those systemic realities then trickle back into how creative writing is taught (because MFA programs want their graduates to get book contracts with the Power 5).
Maybe that's a little afield of your comment? I'd like to hear more about what your writing apprenticeship has looked like so far, how you've begun to form your own aesthetic judgments, and what past models (if any) those are based on? My formative influences were Willa Cather and my mentor, Ted Kooser. There were many writers in the 1990s who shaped my sensibility, as well: Tobias Wolff (who was in turn shaped by Raymond Carver), Kim Barnes, Patricia Hampl, many others. To explain what I mean by craft, I'd probably have to cite examples from them (as I do in today's essay on my personal site).
Thank you for this thoughtful response! I didn’t go to grad school, and my undergrad was focused more on journalism than creative writing, so it’s been a slow process of building my own apprenticeship - which I never thought to use that word until now. I do wonder if I missed out on some of the skills I wish I had by not doing an MFA, but I’m not sure.
Some writing that really sticks out to me and that I return to: Roxane Gay, Melissa Febos, Brandon Taylor, Saeed Jones, Maggie Nelson. I found Jeannine Ouelette’s “writing in the dark” substack this year and find her craft advice helpful, but I’m still playing around with how that manifests in my own work. I currently have a day job in nonprofit marketing, and it’s hard for me to separate that voice from my own at this point in my career.
All that is to say I’m very much in an exploratory stage of all of this and trying to learn as much as I can.
Hi Joshua, I'm interested in this subject as I've studied craft in both an MFA and in Suzanne Kingsbury's Gateless Writing program, where I love that she asserts "writers need craft, not opinion."
However, perhaps one of my biggest stumbling blocks with the idea of "literary" writing/books, is that often I do not ENJOY reading them. And personally, I like to enjoy both reading and writing. I wonder if this is a difference between the sexes - I've read how historically male writers believed one needed to slit one's wrist and "bleed on the page" to write. Yeah, nah. Not for me.
If solid use of craft makes a book more engaging and enjoyable to read, then I'm all for it. But sometimes I feel like a "literary" book can be a bit like the Emperor's new clothes.
Perhaps this is a matter of personal taste and preference. Perhaps I simply enjoy reading memoirs like WHEN BREAT BECOMES AIR by Paul Kalanithi, that get both 'literary' and commercial acclaim.
How interesting, Camilla. Yeah, there probably is some intersection between socialization and craft sensibility. Hemingway and Faulkner being one extreme, perhaps, and Sarah Orne Jewett another. But I don't think Willa Cather (my literary hero) wrote to be intentionally difficult. Her craft manifesto "On Writing" is all about removing barriers, simplifying aesthetics, avoiding explication in favor of suggestion. That's much closer to my sensibility.
Where I think I might quarrel with Kingsbury is in asking where craft comes from, if not from deeply held opinions about aesthetics? This is kind of like my former students who wanted to "just write" and not bother much with reading. Cather's Thea Kronborg confesses to her childhood mentor that there is such a thing as "creative hate" -- a contempt for mediocrity. That is typically thin ice to walk out on these days.
I'm curious if you have examples of literary works that fell flat for you? I agree with you that pretentiousness doesn't help much. My mentor was Ted Kooser, so I've been rather steeped in simplicity rather than baroque plots and intellectual ornamentation. Anthony Doerr's "Cloud, Cuckoo, Land" has some of that overcooked quality, I've heard. Kingsolver's "Demon Copperhead" didn't hold me, either, but I perhaps should give it another try. Chard Harbach's "The Art of Fielding" was another very overhyped book, in my opinion. But that is the tricky thing about craft -- it does require us to have aesthetic opinions!
Thanks for your thoughtful response Joshua. And thank you for telling me about Willa Cather's craft manifesto "On Writing." I will check it out as I'm interested in the ideas of, "removing barriers" and "simplifying aesthetics."
But in considering 'explication' as, "the process of analyzing and developing an idea or principle in detail," I'm not sure I'd be on board with "avoiding explication in favor of suggestion,” as I truly enjoy writing that explores and investigates ideas and principles in detail.
Also, perhaps with Creative Nonfiction, for me it boils down to content. Perhaps you can have the best craft in the world, but if I’m not interested in the content, the writing will not usually keep me engaged.
My personal preferences are authors who some may put in a “spiritual” category, but in essence the writing is about one's state of consciousness or evolution of consciousness. Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, Tosha Silver, Sidra Stone...
I've also been enjoying the contemporary creative non-fiction English writers, Katherine May (Wintering, and Enchantment) and Beth Kempton (The Way of the Fearless Writer, and Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived.) And I really enjoyed the Canadian writer, Glynnis MacNicol’s book, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris. And of course there’s the classic Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass — I love that this had been published 10 years before it hit the NYT bestseller list. And Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted, another grass roots bestseller. And a memoir I found deeply inspirational recently is Cristina Moon’s Three Years on the Great Mountain.
When you write, "But that is the tricky thing about craft — it does require us to have aesthetic opinions!" Perhaps we need to define what we mean by craft — and I'm taking it that your definition of craft goes beyond craft elements such as, narrative arc, character development, lyrical sentences, conflict in story, scene and chapter construction, setting a reader in time and place, beginnings and desire, structure and scaffolding, description and details, juxtaposition, rhythm, etc.
p.s. I see below that you have written, "The way I still try to teach craft (as in my essay today over on my personal site) is very much the latter. It's removing the barriers between readers and the writer, enabling a kind of telepathy, sustaining a reading dream that is also in some way instructive and transcendent. It probably requires a more elegant definition than that!"
Would you care to elaborate?
Kimmerer's book is indeed a gem. I don't know the story about how it was discovered, but I'm glad it was. Perhaps that is the best answer to the question of craft: to do one's work quietly and well, and let fate take care of the rest.
Here's one of Cather's essays from her craft book: https://cather.unl.edu/writings/nonfiction/nf012
I think I'd need my own craft book to answer your last question fully. Here are a few places where I've attempted to define particular craft techniques.
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/you-know-literary-fraud-when-you-see-it
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/the-treachery-of-narrators-in-memoir
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/how-folk-ballads-help-you-write-better-stories
I suspect that the ‘artisan writing’ you aspire to has simply become drowned in the marketing of author-as-consumer product…MFA programs also have created a massive oversupply of writers with artisan standards out of all correlation with any absolute growth in this kind of reader. It’s analogous to academia itself. Oversupply of folks with extremely high standards…but declining demand for them. A society predicated on radical, aspirational autonomy easily mismatches artistic supply with demand for art. The question to ask is: is it not better to have emotional impact on more people than to maximize artisan quality? My answer eventually became yes…broader impact is more satisfying…
That's an interesting way of framing it, James. The MFA boom has complicated things, perhaps the way the GI Bill did before that.
But I don't agree with your framing of artisan standards and demand. For craft to be real and endure, it must exist separately from the marketplace. Sure, I'm wringing my hands about the lack of market appeal for literary work (that's Monk Ellison's dilemma). But reframing craft in terms of scale requires overhauling the whole value system. It's not craft then, not in the way that transcends generations.
So I think the essential question to ask is how to align the "why" of writing with a platform or community that shares that value system. I'm still on the fence about whether Substack does that for me. I have not written a new longform essay in two years, partly because of personal upheaval and partly because I'm trying to turn out quality posts once or twice a week. Some people can make that weekly or bimonthly cycle feed a book project, and that's probably up to me to figure out. But part of me would also like to retire to solitude for a while and come back with something more fully-formed. What stops me is the question of whether there's anyplace left to bring a manuscript like that. Reaching the masses at scale, as you know, means feeding the feed to stay relevant--and hopefully writing the other, longer thing, at the same time.
Thank you James for offering this question.
And perhaps this is simply a debate around what is the *purpose* of craft?
Is it for snob appeal so that a book will be judged as "literary"?
Or is the best use of craft to make the writing engaging and enjoyable to read?
Ah, I think that's a false binary. At least, Horace's ancient dictum was that literature ought to both instruct and delight. I've taught my share of "classics" that were a chore to read. But I really don't think a literary sensibility has to be obscure. That is perhaps another way that the Academy has muddied craft for us.
The way I still try to teach craft (as in my essay today over on my personal site) is very much the latter. It's removing the barriers between readers and the writer, enabling a kind of telepathy, sustaining a reading dream that is also in some way instructive and transcendent. It probably requires a more elegant definition than that!
Great piece Josh. This captures so much of my thought process - this feeling that something is really going wrong with the industry and that what the industry regards as quality is very different from what you or I would regard as quality.
Thanks, Sam. Whether my own definition of quality matters in any objective sense is another question. And I'm still struggling with that idea of us all trying to get people to watch our private home run derbies. There's a paradox here in that we were introduced to writing as a craft, as an art form, through fairly traditional means -- through reading, through "the classics," through classroom instruction -- and so even though I think we need to assert our independence from those structures, we also have a duty to sustain them in some way. Or else where is the apprenticeship for the writer who comes after us? There is part of me that is very uneasy about just throwing the whole system out. It feels a little reckless, like tossing out all of the conventions about gender (as you've written about) or throwing caution to the wind regarding traditional families.