This post is the second in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and the ways it is used in the classroom today, among other things. This week’s interview is with Michael Noll, author of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction.
Michael Noll is the Program Director at the Writers’ League of Texas and the creator of the Read to Write Stories blog, where he has interviewed more than 150 authors about the craft behind the work. His short stories have been published widely, including in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology.
Ruth Joffre: What was the first craft book you read, in whole or in part? What did you learn from it (about craft or about craft books as a genre)?
Michael Noll: When I was in graduate school, I read Bret Anthony Johnson’s Naming the World, and that was my introduction to non-textbook craft books. That book is still a great example of writers talking about exercises that they’ve found useful in actual classrooms with real-live students.
RJ: What craft books have been most formative or influential for you as a writer and why? When you set out to write The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction, did these or other craft books influence how you shaped the book and what you wanted to accomplish with it?
MN: I set out to write a craft book mostly because I could not find a book that matched what I wanted to do in the classroom. There are some good craft books out there (Johnson’s, John Defresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth, Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House). Naming the World has exercises for classrooms, by and large—which is great if you’re teaching writing for the first time and have no idea what to do. The Lie That Tells a Truth is sort of the best version of a textbook-style writing guide—a sort of encyclopedia of what goes into a story. Burning Down the House is a collection of essays on fiction aesthetics and philosophy. But I wanted something more practical. Literary terms like “character” and “plot” don’t really exist in discrete forms in a story. Instead, there are sentences that do a lot of things at once. Learning to write isn’t about learning how to craft a character but, instead, learning how to write sentences and paragraphs that do all of those things and keep the story moving.
Writing is a lot like learning to play a sport. You pick up a baseball bat, swing it, watch someone better than you swing, and then try to swing it like them (which means internalizing what you’re seeing them do so that your own nerves and muscles can incorporate it into what your body is capable of doing).
RJ: Your craft book grew out of your blog Read to Write Stories, which included exercises and prompts based on close readings of texts, as well as interviews with writers about craft. What did you learn from the process of turning your blog into a book? Did your relationship with the material change or deepen due to this process?
MN: At the blog, I had no plan from week to week. I’d find a cool story and create an exercise based on some aspect of it. For the book, I had to think comprehensively—what haven’t I talked about? I also had to tie the exercises and essays together—though they’re tied together loosely so that each can be read out of order.
RJ: The Writer’s Field Guide is broken into three main parts (“Tools of the Trade,” “Lenses for the Artist’s Vision,” and “Putting It Together on Page One”), each of which is broken into smaller sections, such as “How to Create Compelling Characters” and “How to Make Dialogue Snap.” How did you choose this three-part structure? When you were writing the book, did you consider and discard alternate structures? If so, why?
MN: I have to give credit to my editor, Jill Meyers. I don’t remember exactly how the structure came about, but I’m pretty sure the distinctions for tools and lenses were her idea. The “Putting It Together on Page One” section was actually built out of a presentation that I did—and which, in turn, is a reflection of how I tend to teach. I’ll take a story, or a page of a story, and point out all of the cool things that are going on—writing-wise—and offer short exercises for how writers can incorporate do something similar in their own work, according to that work’s needs.
RJ: One thing I appreciated about your craft book was that it focused on contemporary works rather than on the classics. There’s a great deal to be said about writers like Shakespeare, Henry James, and E. M Forster, but if we only study them we end up centering the voices of white men. By studying the works of contemporary writers, you have included more women and people of color. Was this something you were aware of while writing? Do you feel that this strengthens the book overall?
MN: I am a ferocious advocate for contemporary works. I like the classics, too, but they’ve gotten their due. In K-12 schools, almost all assigned readings are classics, even though you can find contemporary works that tackle the same subject matter equally well—and often better. If it was up to me, every single teacher who assigns To Kill a Mockingbird would also assign any one of Jason Reynolds’ books, which are better written, more thoughtful, and certainly more contemporary than that particular classic. Pick any classic and you can find a current author doing something similar on a literary level but with a perspective that is much more current. Why read Henry James when you can read Garth Greenwell (who does some similar literary things as James but about blowjobs instead of glances)?*
My biggest complaint about many writing guides is that they’re full of white guys. I once used a very famous writing guide in a classroom, and it was all white people and Junot Díaz. There is no pedagogical approach that thinks tokenism is a good idea, yet we do it in creative writing all of the time. When I first started on the blog, I made a conscious decision to read outside of the literary-white-man genre. That meant, obviously, reading people of color and LGTBQ+ writers, but it also meant reading science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, and romance.
The two best authors that I’ve read the past few years are Kiese Laymon and N.K. Jemisin. Neither is white and neither is writing the usual version of their particular genre. The best literary reading I’ve attended was by Jason Reynolds, Danez Smith, and Lisa Ko—I don’t know how you could watch the three of them in conversation and not want to go home and spend all night writing. I’ve actually written a draft of a middle grade novel because something about how Reynolds structured the first chapter of Ghost clicked in my brain—I was like, oh, so that’s how you do it. Any craft book that doesn’t reflect the breadth and depth of the incredible writing currently being done is doing a disservice to anyone trying to learn to write.
RJ: In the “How to Use This Book” section of The Writer’s Field Guide, you write that workshop exists “because it’s how we think we learn.” This is an important distinction: we believe there is a certain way to learn how to write, but how we actually learn varies from person to person, and many people will benefit from the practical approach you put forth in your book. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this approach? How do you see it engaging with or contributing to creative writing pedagogy as it exists today?
MN: The strength of the approach in the book is, I think, its practicality and versatility. It can help you write a sentence that gets your story moving in the right direction—and it can do so without forcing you to write a sentence and story you don’t want to write. It also works well for writers who want to work in private and not share their work until it’s as done as we can get it (which is many of us). The weakness of the approach, at least in terms of using it in a classroom, is that people are so conditioned to workshop that they push back against doing less of it. Of course, it’s crucially important to have people read your work and the easiest way to find a great reader of your work is through workshop. But so much of workshop can be frustrating to everyone involved. Almost all prescriptive feedback in a workshop is bad or not helpful. There are also group dynamics at work—and since workshops have tended to be male and white, those dynamics have reflected all of the social problems associated with white guys. Plus, workshop feedback is only as good as the ability of the participants to identify where a story is breaking down, which requires a high level of close-reading ability. I’ve found that using exercises like those in the book changes the type of discourse in a workshop discussion. People start saying things like, “It’s like in that story we read, where ___ happened, you could do something kind of like that.”
RJ: In another interview, you wrote about how without Jill Meyers, the Director of A Strange Object, you would not have turned your blog into a craft book. Can you tell us how your relationships with Jill Meyers and other publishing professionals (editors, publishers, agents, et al.) have shaped your career? What advice would you give to a writer looking to make these kinds of connections?
MN: Jill published my first story when she was the editor of American Short Fiction. She hired me to teach a workshop for ASF, and it was in that class that I bumped up against my limitations as a writing teacher and, out of necessity, came up with the strategy that I developed further at Read to Write Stories and then put to use in the book. She read the blog and suggested that it might lead to a book–and then she was the one to buy it.
I know that I just said that it’s sometimes better to learn to write on your own, but it’s also necessary to take part in a writing community. At the very least, you can commiserate with other writers and celebrate their successes. And, you learn about new books and authors and gossip about bad ones. Most importantly, though, a writing community builds the shelves where its members’ books will eventually go. You can see this in blurbs. Other people have said this, but you can tell which MFA programs a new writer went to based on their blurbs.
I actually gave an assignment years ago to a college composition class: identify and describe a person who is a model for what you want to do in your career. As an example, I talked about Roxane Gay, who is the best example of building bookshelves that I can think of. She has written reviews of books and even literary journals. She keeps finding ways to publish the sort of work she wants to read. She promotes authors that most literary venues might overlook. I learned about Kiese Laymon through an interview she did with him.
RJ: Since the publication of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction, the Read to Write Stories blog has largely gone silent. What’s next for the blog? Do you intend to continue the work you’ve done there in other forms?
MN: The book really felt like a culmination of everything that I did in the blog for five years, and so I’ve struggled to find a new direction for it. Also, I’ve published some craft essays and interviews in other places. And, frankly, I’m finishing a novel, and in between work, kids, trying to find a spare moment to spend with my wife (who is also a writer) that doesn’t involve work and kids, I’ve had to winnow down some of what I’ve been doing. I’m not yet sure what’s next.
I also took time after the 2016 election to start a website called Books Are Not a Luxury. I was so disgusted at the racism and bigotry at the heart of Trump’s campaign that I tried to promote books by writers of color, queer and trans writers, and writers with disabilities. I worked with bookstores to carry the books and published essays about the books by other writers. That’s a project that may come back to life at some point—perhaps in another form.
RJ: Finally, what are you working on now?
MN: Right now, I’m doing a final revision on a novel. It’s based on the true story of a family of serial killers who lived down the road from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little house on the Kansas prairie. I grew up on a Kansas farm. My grandfather grew up not far from the Ingalls homestead, and every year in elementary school we’d dress up as pioneers. So, when I found out about the Bloody Benders, it was a natural fit. And the leader of the family was a young woman, and so it gave me a chance to write a kind of literary answer to Little House on the Prairie, which is a novel that is far worse than is often talked about, and the recent biography Prairie Fire (which was great in many ways) was definitely not great at handling the racism and misogny intrinsic to not just Wilder’s novels but her newspaper writing and the general way her writing reflects a great deal about the attitudes of the Midwest. I really loved Leila Lalami’s novel The Moor’s Account, which tells the story of Estevanico, a black slave who was one of four people to survive the journey from Florida, through Texas, to Mexico that Cabeza de Vaca wrote about in his famous account. It’s a straight-up adventure novel with a sharp, modern sensibility. I want to do the same thing with my novel.
*Update (7/14/19): Following the initial publication of this interview, Michael Noll expanded on his thoughts about Henry James’ and Garth Greenwell’s work:
“I’m an admirer of Henry James’ work. I once assigned a 400-person sophomore college lit class to read The Beast in the Jungle, which starts off with a very long scene where the main character trades glances with a woman he suspects he knows. I thought of that scene when I read What Belongs to You, in particular the opening where the narrator meets Mitko B in the men’s restroom. My students in that lit class hated The Beast in the Jungle—no surprise, as it’s a pretty dense read. But I felt after reading What Belongs to You that if they had read Greenwell’s novel instead, they would have been exposed to a similar style as James’ in terms of pacing, interiority, and close observation of very small details of body language—but it would have led to a blowjob in a men’s restroom instead of a conversation in a parlor. I’m certain that the students would have paid much closer attention to Greenwell’s scene because of the material: not just the sex but because of the inaccessibility of James’ world to most American college students.”