Learning the Craft of Creative Writing
Discussion and a Prompt
Managing Expectations
In creative writing, there are no rules.
That’s right. No rules.
But there is craft.
And learning the craft of creative writing is not the same as learning rules. It took me many years to understand this. Once I did, though, my creative writing took off and I began to enjoy the writing and revision process on a different level.
In his craft book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders talks about how he had at one time saw himself “as a Hemingwayesque realist.” But he had trouble making his writing “live” (p. 107). He notes that when he set “aside [the] idea of what a ‘classic’ story sounded like,” there was finally energy, a spark.
Expectations are tricky things. And we’re bombarded with (often skewed) expectations every day: how we should look, how we should act, whom we should love, what we should do with our lives.
And how we should write.
What a story should be.
But such expectations are based on biases. In writing, there can be strong cultural or genre preferences that inform a person’s belief of what makes a “good” story.
Reading broadly—across cultures, across genres—is one way to manage these expectations.
Intimately connected to reading broadly is learning and understanding craft.
Rules Schmules
One writing “rule” that gets touted a lot is “Show, don’t tell,” which is misleading at best. At the very least, I would suggest reframing it as “show vs. tell” because craft is not about what you should do but about learning what is effective for the piece at hand, e.g., understanding when “tell” (i.e., using narrative summary) may be most appropriate and when “show” (i.e., creating a scene) might be more effective.
But even when reframed, it’s still imprecise and vague advice. And it’s also important to note that many common writing “rules” (such as “Show, don’t tell”) are Western-centric; they are not universal preferences.
Additionally, such “rules” can be genre-specific. A lot of short fiction (microfiction, flash fiction), for example, contains very little “show.” That’s simply the nature of the form.
Statements such as “Show, don’t tell” are attempts to simplify something that’s much more complex than a stale adage can even begin to relay. Like any topic of craft, understanding requires reading broadly and analyzing what you read to understand how and why an author makes the choices they make.
Conventions Aren’t Rules, But You Should Still Learn Them
I want to pause for a minute to talk briefly about creative writing conventions.
Conventions are also not the same as rules (and, again, may be Western-centric).
Using quotation marks to indicate dialogue, for example, is a convention that writers should be aware of and know how to use, but there is no rule that says creative writers must use quotation marks to indicate dialogue. In fact, I would estimate that well over half of the published fiction I read eschews this particular convention.
Choosing to follow or not follow a convention is a stylistic choice that a writer makes. To effectively make such stylistic choices, though, a writer needs to understand the implications of such a choice.
Again, that’s where studying craft comes in.
My Own Journey
Learning from Example
Starting from about age five or six, I wrote with abandon. Stories, songs, plays. Whatever grabbed my fancy. By the time I was seven, I was binding my stories with construction paper and would sometimes even add an author bio to the back cover like I’d seen in the books I read. And I often got my sister to illustrate my stories.
I knew nothing of creative writing. And I didn’t consciously connect anything I was learning in school (e.g., spelling, grammar) to the creative writing I was doing at home. But I was an avid reader, always immersed in books.
I look back at some of my early stories and am impressed at how I correctly used quotation marks and speech tags. At age seven! And I’m impressed at how my stories actually seem (somewhat) “developed” and cohesive. I seemed to understand how to create conflict and set a scene.
I wasn’t taught to do any of it. I wasn’t given any rules or instructions. I was merely mimicking what I had been exposed to.
I’d read a poem, and I’d write a poem. I’d read a play, and I’d write a play. I often copied the form explicitly, following the patterns I saw (e.g., where I noticed conflict was introduced—say, in the second paragraph—is where I’d also introduce conflict); although I didn’t know it at the time, this is precisely how writers learn and study craft.
And this didn’t just apply to writing. My sister and I often sat and drew together. My sister, four years older than me, had a knack for drawing most things, but seemed especially good at drawing people and faces. My sister and I are Gen Xers; although our mom was a stay-at-home mom, we were left to our own devices much of the time. And creativity and reading were both highly encouraged. My mom often picked up arts and crafts books at garage sales (e.g., I remember one book about how to draw animals). My sister would learn something either from a book or from a school art class and then practice it. And I would watch her and practice on my own as well, usually by sitting next to her and copying what she did.
One day when I was in sixth grade, I recall my sister looking at some drawings I had done, and she was stunned. It had probably been a couple years since we had drawn together, but I had continued to draw on my own. She said, “How did you get so good?” And I answered quite simply, “From watching you.” Other than my elementary school art classes, I’d never had any formal drawing instruction.
We’re inspired by others. By others’ work. And as writers—artists—we should use that.
To be a writer, you have to read, and you have to write. Much like I did when I was little, whenever I read something really engaging or unique, I still find myself trying to emulate the style, the technique.
You’ve probably heard that you should read the kind of stuff you hope to write. And this is absolutely true. But I would also encourage you to read outside of your comfort zone. (I write more about this topic in this blog post from 2021.) Reading widely/broadly and then trying to capture the style of something you’ve just read will help you find your own voice. It’s allegedly how Ben Franklin became a skilled writer.
From Rule Stickler to Rule Defier
Although I continued to write creatively through junior high and high school, I didn’t have any guidance in that area. I had fabulous English teachers, but the focus was on academic writing and how to perform well on the AP English exam. The writing I learned was highly rule-based, and I was good at it. I knew about thesis statements, and I excelled at grammar and punctuation. As a senior, I volunteered in my high school’s writing center; and later, I worked in my college’s writing center. These skills have served me very well as an editor, but back in my early twenties, having had no creative writing training, I looked for ways to apply these same rules to fiction because my thoughts had turned to publication. How can I get published?
But the writing rules I had learned up to that point were about the technical aspects of writing and not geared toward fiction; they had nothing to do with creative writing craft.
In my later twenties, when I was finally exposed to writing workshops, I clung tight to any rule someone would give me because that was my writing experience thus far. That’s all I needed to become a better writer, to get published, I was sure of it. I became very prescriptive as a critiquer as well, telling my fellow writers the same things they told me: “Show, don’t tell,” “Do this,” “Change this.”
The reality, though, is that I didn’t really know what to do with these rules. I would try to follow them, but my creative writing seemed stilted, boring.
Others were trying to mold me into a particular kind of writer, and I was doing the same to them. We were all grasping at rules because rules are safe; they’re comfortable.
They’re not craft.
For me, the result was stale and uninspired writing, and, consequently, I all but stopped writing fiction, focusing on poetry instead, believing that only poetry could give me the flexibility I was looking for.
Lightbulb Moment
Due to a job change in 2015, I moved to Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature, where I was suddenly exposed to a broader range of literature and literary offerings—readings, workshops, etc. It was eye-opening.
Inspired, I returned, newly energized, to fiction and found myself actually developing a writing voice. The following year, I applied to an MFA program. An MFA, of course, is not needed to be a writer; the program I was in, though, was beneficial for me because it helped me understand more fully what craft is. Earning my MFA was by no means an end-all. On the contrary, it was just the beginning.
I continue to take creative writing classes/workshops and attend writing conferences or festivals, and I continue to learn from incredibly talented writing peers both in and out of workshops. I am often inspired by their work and, much like I did when I was young, I find myself emulating others so that I can improve as a writer.
At the very beginning of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders writes that in the Russian story class he teaches, “I sometimes joke (and yet not) that we’re reading to see what we can steal” (p.3).
And in many ways, that’s exactly (though not really) what we’re doing when we study craft.
Prompt
Sometime around 2016, I read the flash story “Currents” by Hannah Bottomy Voskuil, which is uniquely written in reverse chronological order.
The story blew me away then and still blows me away.
Here’s my challenge to you:
Read “Currents” and study it. How did the writer do it? Why does it work?
Then, try writing your own story in reverse chronological order, using “Currents” as a template of sorts.
This is how you learn craft.
No rules needed.