This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions
of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about
whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are
intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review).
The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers
in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In
this bold and original examination of elements of writing--including
plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability--and aspects of
workshop--including the silenced writer and the imagined reader--Matthew
Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends
Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft,
and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse
backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into
literary spaces?
Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious
George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian
American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and
the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will
find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new
methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing
guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows
that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of
published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds
us, "When we write fiction, we write the world."
