I’ve been hearing about Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping from writers and editors since it came out, and it exceeded even my very high expectations. Have you ever had the feeling when reading a book that it is something you’d been searching for—knowingly or not—for years? It’s pure magic when it happens, and it hit me hard from the opening pages of Salesses’s book.

The main thrust of the book is contained right there in the title: Salesses’s goal is “to take craft out of some imaginary vacuum (as if meaning in fiction is separate from meaning in life) and return it to its cultural and historical context.” In other words, lessons about writing craft and judgments about what ‘good’ writing looks like are not neutral, but rather are “a set of expectations . . . shaped by workshop, by reading, by awards and gatekeepers, by biases about whose stories matter and how they should be told.”

What Salesses offers instead is not a rejection or a renaming of the rules or expectation of craft, but rather a clear-eyed investigation of why and how they work, along with concrete suggestions for how we might think about them differently. As always, knowledge is power, and Salesses’s ultimate goal is to empower writers to better understand the rules so they can decide whether and how to engage with or challenge them: “Like in revision, the fiction writer must break down what she thinks she knows about her craft in order to liberate it.” This is a particularly powerful and important intervention for any writer occupying a position that is outside the dominant one. Such writers “are rarely told that these rules are more than ‘just craft’ or ‘pure craft,’ that rules are always cultural. The spread of craft starts to feel and work like colonization.” Similarly, conventions or stories from other traditions may be othered or exoticized.

Salesses spends a great deal of time examining how craft rules and conventions operate within the workshop structure that dominates formal creative writing instruction. As someone who did not come through that system but through an adjacent one (with its own set of invisible but rigid conventions), it was fascinating to see the almost monolithic power of workshop, even in the language Salesses uses. The word workshop is used as a verb, a noun—frequently as a concept that does not even need an article in front of it: “If we are trying, through workshop, to see our own work better, to re-see (as in revision), then with which gaze are we re-seeing? Workshop should be a place that helps a writer see and re-see for herself. The goal of workshop should be to provide the tools a writer will use long after the workshop disbands.”

But the book has much to offer to readers more interested in writing craft than in the workshop method by which it is typically delivered. For me, perhaps the most powerful concept was Salesses’s use of the terms implied author and implied reader, which he draws from literary critic Wayne Booth’s 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction. As Salesses defines them, “The reader’s ‘second self’—the implied reader—is the one who experiences the characters as people, even if the real self knows that they are made up. The author’s ‘second self’—the implied author—is the version of the author that readers imagine from the text (and even occasionally mistake for the real author).”

Salesses goes on to show how powerful the concept of the implied reader, in particular, can be for writers. Authors can use the tools of writing craft to deliberately create the implied reader by suggesting “what they should believe in and care about, what they need explained and/or named, where they should focus their attention, what meaning to draw from the text.” Salesses returns to these concepts in later sections on writing concepts like relatability, believability, and vulnerability, which all engage with readers’ assumptions about how the world works.

This section of the book titled “Redefining Craft Terms” is full of fresh insights about common writing terms like tone, plot, conflict, and setting. When discussing plot, for example, Salesses puts pressure on the writing craft advice that prizes causality over coincidence (advice that I often given myself): “Fiction in which the world is constantly putting demands on characters, rather than the other way around—like a plague or global warming or fascism—is equally as compelling and true (if not more so to certain audiences). The hero story is its own fantasy.” Similarly, Salesses points out in the section on conflict that individual agency exists on a spectrum. When authors create characters that exist within “a particular and specific context,” readers can better understand the meaningful consequences of conflict.

The appendix of the book offers a rich array of what Salesses calls “purpose-oriented writing exercises” as well as a collection of revision exercises that are alone worth the price of the book. This is a book to keep handy on a shelf and turn to when you are feeling stuck and need a fresh way of looking at your idea or manuscript. For example, here’s one from the revision section that offers an excellent way to increase the power and consequences of your setting:

“The world acts. Make sure setting has an effect on the story and is not just a place to set it, a stage for the characters to act on. Try this: consolidate your settings to one to three total. If each setting has more room on the page now, how can setting be more involved in the story, how can it change and be changed by the characters? Expand until the story is the same length as before, with fewer settings doing more work.”

Finally, I can’t end the review without mentioning that Salesses actively engages with the genre/literary fiction divide I’ve traced through many of these book reviews. He admits that the “book will focus on literary fiction because its expectations are the expectations I know best” and that most literary fiction is no different from genre fiction in that “it meets the expectations of a specific audience.” More importantly, the strategies he presents and models throughout the book will help writers of genre and literary fiction alike to clearly define their audience and that audience’s expectations before deciding how to meet or challenge those expectations.

I’ll leave you with one more sentence from Salesses that I think sums up the message of Craft in the Real World: “Craft is both much more and much less than we’re taught it is.” Craft is like culture in that it underlies everything. And yet, when we approach it with intention, we have the power to use it as a tool for our own ends.

Interested in more reviews of books about writing and creativity? Check out our Book Review page or Kristen’s book All the Words: A Year of Reading About Writing. You can read the first chapter and order a digital or paper copy from our shop.