Last week, I was at a reading by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer at Book Soup in West Hollywood, and I had the good fortune to hear him answer a question about the advice he often gave to students still in the early phases of their writing careers. To paraphrase, his response was that if people in a workshop tell you that a particular section of your piece “doesn’t work” and advise you to delete it, you should actually try to keep it. As he put it, that’s the part of your piece that’s likely the most inventive and unconventional, which is why a workshop might have treated it with hesitation. Instead, he argued that you should embrace what is unconventional and make the rest of your piece better fit that particular section.
His advice was interesting, not only because it confirmed some of my own uncertainties about the notes I often receive (as well as give) in writers workshops, but also because it led me to reflect on how so many of us talk about our fiction in terms of what works and doesn’t work, which always struck me as far too Puritan for something meant to be artistic. This has of course long been the language writers use to describe the process of writing fiction (we call it a workshop, after all), and ever since the ascendancy of MFA programs, we’ve all looked at writing as a craft. James Wood’s now-classic 2008 book about writing is even called How Fiction Works.
I don’t want to completely downplay the benefits of this approach—treating fiction writing as a craft rather than the result of artistic whimsy not only forces writers to approach it with the necessary discipline, but it also makes it more democratic by showing how success is not simply the result of some quasi-aristocratic innate artistic talent but instead something that ideally anyone can achieve, provided they put in the work. But I do wonder if our overemphasis on craft at the expense of art has led us to produce overly conventional novels and stories, the kind of safe writing that Andrew Sean Greer warned against. What if the utilitarian and industrial subtext of the word workshop actually creeps through in the notes we give and leads us to sand away the unconventional and the innovative, as a carpenter might with blemishes on a piece of wood? The result might be perfectly sturdy and polished—but should a novel be judged by the same metrics as a table?
I’m obviously not the first person to criticize the style known as “program fiction” in this way. Elif Batuman did so memorably all the way back in 2006 in an article in Issue 4 of n+1:
Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work, that mysterious activity—where is it? On Wall Street, at Sloane-Kettering, in Sudan?—turn in shame to the notion of writing as “craft.” (If art is aristocratic, decadent, egotistical, self-indulgent, then craft is useful, humble, ascetic, anorexic—a form of whittling.)
It’s likely we’ll have this debate as long as writing programs and workshops exist—and perhaps, years from now, some future blogger will argue that fiction has lots all discipline and become too pretentious and needs to return to the rigors of the workshop. But for now, I do feel that our obsession with always making sure our fiction works can hold us back from our unconventional artistic impulses.
One of my favorite novels is Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s 1964 Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, a hundred and sixty pages written in one long sentence (granted, it’s a run-on a sentence) that follows the eventful life of a man who lived through the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and witnessed how thoroughly the world changed in the early-twentieth century. The novel may not always work in every sense—from a contemporary craft perspective it may be considered a little “rough”—but to me any possible blemish is worth the breathless intensity of that long string of words. Sadly, if Hrabal found himself in a workshop today, he would likely be asked whether it “really needs to all be one sentence.”