Are craft books crafty enough?

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The other day an intrepid reader of this substack (hi!) asked me if I had any recommendations for craft books. I pondered this for a while, and ultimately didn’t have a satisfying answer. Of course, I love Stephen King’s On Writing (as does everyone) and I also like Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me (which deals with some issues related to being a cross-genre writer). But On Writing always struck me as being motivational rather than “how-to”—I always think about his story about impaling all this rejection letters on a nail, and when they got full, getting another nail. I have a stack of craft books, and probably more that I’ve read over the years but I often (and I’m saying this as a person who totally wants a book deal to do a craft book) find them dissatisfying. They are often one or some combination of motivational (which is great, but doesn’t teach you how to write), vague, or line-by-line analyses of someone else’s work (fine, sometimes.)

I’m trying to parse apart why exactly I don’t like them. First of all, can one be taught to write? Yes, I think so, but if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I am anti-MFA. (As in, get one if you want, but you don’t need one and it’s a bad financial/ temporal investment.) But often times the directions on how to get better at writing are very general—they are more like “things to do whereby if you do them via osmosis you may get better”—rather than literal things to make you stronger.

Reading

I’m going to come out and say that reading is by far the best way to learn to be a better writer but it is utterly useless if you are incapable of thinking analytically about what you’ve just read, which, I hate to say, is true of some people. Do professional basketball players watch tape of people playing basketball and magically absorb whatever is good that just happened? No. When you’re reading, you should be doing the equivalent of an athlete watching tape. Imagine a coach pointing out to his team what the center just did in a particulate play—there’s going to be one player who immediately gets what the coach is saying before his sentence is even finished. One player who gets it once it’s pointed out to him. And one player who might not get it at all. (Well, probably not on a professional basketball team, but you get my point).

I am mainly a reader of literary fiction plus maybe 20 percent mysteries. One year I decided, let me read the top rated book in every genre to see what the best of the best is. I had never read an epic fantasy, but the first few Game of Thrones books are consistently rated to be excellent by people who read that genre. So I sat down and read the first book. I was surprised how much I liked it because I had never read epic fantasy. Some readers will stop there—with “I liked it.” Other readers will take that one step further: why did I like it? Well, I liked that there is an expansive cast of characters, but I’ll still able to be invested in them. I liked the deep sense of worldbuilding. I liked how this wasn’t necessarily a “and the good guys will win” type of story. Again, some readers will stop there. The really analytic reader will take this one more step, “Okay, how did George RR Martin make an expansive cast that I’m invested in?”

I can literally walk you through an instance of me doing this because I have my old notes from 2021. As you may know, my second book A Step Past Darkness is a deep homage to Stephen King’s It even though I’m not sure it can squarely be said it’s a horror novel. I loved It so much that I was constantly looking for other novels that felt similar, but I could never find any, so I set out to write one. What I did first (and I did this before I even started working on the plot) was write a list of why I loved the book so much/ what worked so well about it. This is the actual list from my notes back then:

Friendship

Feeling of being so young but again something so insurmountable

Adults can’t help

Home isn’t necessarily where the heart is.

The town itself is corrupt/ evil

The feeling of understanding the whole geography of the town

On the cusp of adolescence

Genuinely scary

Genuinely funny

Beginnings of love.

Platonic love

Each character had a full backstory and they weren’t confusable.

Stakes were so high- no other novel has felt like the kids were more in peril

A sense of time- what it was like in the 50s in this small town.

The reunion scene was so great

The you can go home again sense

The fear that they could not recapture the power of their youth

You can enjoy seeing the adult versions of the kids you were so invested in.

Long, sprawling chapters where you really got to know the characters.

What are key locations for the town?

With the exception of “genuinely scary” and “no other novel has felt like the kids were more in peril,” I made a concerted effort to get all of these aspects into my own novel (and if you read reviews of people who “got” the book, I think I succeeded). [I was not attempting incidentally, to make a genuinely scary book. I don’t scare easy, so I find it hard to write things that are scary. Creepy maybe, scary no. And on that second one, I just don’t know if I will ever read a horror novel that had as high stakes as It—something that combines the horrificness of the big bad with how in over their heads the MCs are as kids. Trying to hit that would feel too high a bar.] I thought about how to do each of these elements. Okay, friendship: you need to show people who don’t really know each other spending time together, finding commonality, or suffering together, growing their intimacy with each other. I showed the geography of the entire town by drawing a map, by characters describing different locations and giving each of those locations a history: there’s a “Good park” on the rich side of town that is nice, and a “bad park” where the burnouts do drugs and drink beer. There’s an abandoned mine with 100+ years of history. There’s a secretive megachurch. How do you have a lot of MCs without it being confusing and all of them seem distinct? I did this the same way King did: long chapters, deep interiority, learning about each kid’s family, seeing each kid from different reflections of the other kids. Doing this inherently takes care of wanting the reader to be invested in how each kid turns out: if I make you like them at time point 1, you’re going to be invested in who they are 20 years later.

When you’re reading a book, try to think about what works about it, and what doesn’t. How did the author do the things that worked? For what didn’t work, what could the author have done to make it work? How would you make it work? Beyond that, draw your analysis across multiple books. What is missing in the romance genre? (something you can’t answer unless you are reading a lot of the romance books coming out). How are all these romantasy books all kind of the same?

Workshopping

I’ve probably said this before, but I think workshopping has really diminishing returns over time. Do three or four workshops, then you needn’t do anymore, if at all. The problem with workshopping is that its a horse drawn by committee and some of the committee is made up of idiots. Seriously, workshopping is only as good as the people in your workshop (the first problem) and not all good writers are good editors (the second problem). It might be really useful to hear 10 people in a row say they found the plot of your book confusing—one needn’t have a plot that 0% of people find sensible, but if everyone finds it confusing, you have a problem. Sometimes people are too willing to make changes that are suggested in workshop (I once saw a girl take what was a solid story that was probably ready to be submitted somewhere and make it substantially worse by taking everyone’s suggestions). And I think too often suggestions in workshop are prescriptive rather than descriptive.

The problem with workshopping is that you can’t write anything shaggy. I’ve mentioned this short story before that I wrote but never got published that’s the best story I’ve ever written. It’s about 911. It’s very disturbing. When I workshopped it, it made people uncomfortable and left a bad taste in their mouth, so they wanted the end to not be as negative as it was. But…. It’s a story about 911. It’s a story about why I don’t believe in god. It’s literally written to make you feel unsettled. I once wrote this other story that had a classic creepy old house set up—this girl is house sitting for a weird old professor of hers, and while alone in the house keeps finding creepy things: a voice that speaks to her from the darkness of the basement, children’s footprints on the ceiling of a bedroom. The point of the story is that this adventure-to-be-had is interrupted by a loud, squealing family who interrupt the would-be adventure with their basicness and judgment. But several people in the workshop were like “Well, I wanted the mystery of what’s going on in the house—what’s the story there? Why were there footprints on the ceiling? The family interrupts all the stuff I was interested in” Yeah… They do..

Critique Groups

It’s hard for me to identify exactly why I think critique groups are not the same as workshops. Maybe it’s because I think of workshops as having a more formal procedure: everyone goes, everyone reads and comments, the writer typically can’t talk, comments are a free-for-all excepting rudeness. At least with all the critique groups I’ve been in, we all draw our own rules based on what we need. When I’m drafting, I want to hand over chunks of 100 pages at a time and there are specific things I want to know and don’t want to know. I’m drafting—I don’t want workshop comments, I want to know, which characters do you like? What questions are you invested in? Is X confusing? On a critique of a revision, I might ask something like, I needed to punch up character Y- does this work? To me, at least, there’s a problem solving aspect to critique groups that seems less present than workshops. Something more like, “agents are saying they just can’t connect with the character. What is up with that?” then we discuss it at length and discuss how it could be dealt with, or whether the commentary is even valid. (In workshop, it just would have been a very brief conversation about this if anyone brought it up, and only a more robust conversation if people disagreed.) A workshop is goodreads, a critique group is a war room.

Going through edits

One way we learn is by going through edits made by an editor. The issue with this, from a “learning craft” perspective, is that it is “learning by doing” rather than instructional. My editor told me, “You need to make how Jia feels about her powers—and how that changes over time—more apparent.” She didn’t tell me how to do that (though I suppose I could have asked)—I just knew. This is one instance where the good writers will be separated from the “good enough to get attention but not good enough to follow through” writers. You need to know how to fix it. If you’re analytical, you can sort of teach yourself in response to edits. Or maybe you brainstorm with your critique group. Or maybe you flat out ask your editor for something prescriptive.

Do you see what’s missing here?

Basketball players don’t get better at basketball just by watching other people play (reading) or by playing basketball (writing.) They also do things that are ostensibly not related to their game that actually improve their game; that is to say, they exercise specific component skills. Basketball players lift weights to increase their muscle strength which allows them to jump higher. Boxers will jump rope even though they, of course, never end up doing that specific thing in the ring.

IMHO, most writers don’t really do this. Most writers don’t do dialogue exercises or—god forbid—plot exercises. They either write a novel or short story, and people tell them the dialogue sucks, and then they try to make it better… somehow. I’ve said this elsewhere in this substack, but one of the reasons so many books have bad plots is because most people have written very few plots. As in, they’ve written 3 plots: one was the book they got published, and 2 were the other two books they didn’t get published. But what if you just like… wrote an entire plot of a book just as an exercise? Because only when you do something over and over can you get better at it—you can do it more readily, more rapidly respond with more agility with needs to change it . Someone who is skilled at writing plot is not the sort of person to write 400 pages of a novel, then realize the plot doesn’t work and have to scrap the whole thing. What if you tried to write a few pages to characterize your hometown? Okay, now condense that to one page, but have it still perfectly encapsulate that town. Okay, now you have one paragraph. What if you drew a random set of adjectives and built a three dimensional character off that, just as an exercise, without the expectation that you do anything with it? What would, for you, be the writerly equivalent of lifting weights in the gym?

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