Still circling around that last post, which I now think of as the "writerly-crafty" post.
Writing as craft. The Craft. I hear that a lot. I just used it in an interview I'm doing with somebody right now. This is a normal thing to say, but it also makes me nervous. Partly this is anxiety because I have never done a writing workshop,* which is where they teach you the Craft, and so I feel that I really don't know much about Craft, not Craft as Craft the way it's taught in writing classes. Partly it's because something in me resists the idea of writing as craft. Why is writing like a craft? Why is a raven like a writing-desk? And partly it's because I am anxious about my knee-jerk dismissal of the idea of writing as craft, because what am I proposing in its place, other than the idea that writers are artists in the romantic sense of the untaught, natural genius? And this idea makes me just as uncomfortable, because it suggests that writers are merrily piping away like larks in the spring rather than working.
To say "writerly-crafty": this could be to diminish what you do, as I said last time. It could also be to defend your work from the charge of uselessness. Or it could be an attempt to get chummy with people, to demystify writing and make it seem normal and doable and teachable and for everyone rather than a few. If you believe this, great. If you don't quite--and I don't, quite--then you are being crafty in a different way.
To say "writerly-crafty" could also be a way of talking about what you cannot really talk about, a process too intimate and personal for frank discussion. Using "craft" as an approximation or metaphor, or using it as a disguise. Maybe you don't want to talk about what it really is. Maybe you're too superstitious (writers, like athletes, are horribly superstitious). Maybe you say it's a craft to keep from pronouncing its actual name. In which case you are also being crafty.
*I took two one-week poetry workshops with Nick Lindsay when I was in college. They were wonderful. He used to take out this recorder and make the most anguished sounds on it. I also did a one-day workshop with Catherynne M. Valente at WisCon. She was wonderful; I was thoughtless in choosing work to submit, and showered everyone with nervous praise.
7 comments:
I'm not so sure about the term "craft" (and I'm not that kind of writer anyway) but I always appreciate discussions of art that treat it as work, a skill that has to be honed and perfected, and something that requires effort and care. It feels like a necessary corrective to the all-too-common perception of the artist as being off in their own world, above the mundane, material concerns of ours, "creating" through sheer power of their genius.
You're not wrong, of course, that these two takes on art can be strongly gendered, especially when you bring "craft" into the discussion. I read The Madwoman in the Attic last month, and what you're saying here is chiming with some of the ideas raised there, particularly the argument that 19th century women writers were drawn to the novel because novels were perceived as work, something you did to pay the bills, while shying away from poetry, which was perceived as art and thus presumably came into existence fully-formed, the emanation of its (male) creator's genius.
Yes! I agree with all of this. (Haven't read The M. in the A., but it's been on my list for ages.) Certainly one's writing gets better through hard work. My God, how awful if it didn't! I have seen that slow improvement achieved through hard work in my short stories, and hope to see it happen with my next novel. But "craft" also suggests something that you learn by taking a class rather than by observation, and being untaught, I have to make a space for writing to be something other than that, simply out of self-preservation!
I'm also reacting here not just to "craft" but to my unthinking and coy use of "writerly-crafty" in my last post--a term (can we call it that? It's really more of a gaffe than a term) that suggested the gender issue you bring up, as well as the other stuff I discuss in the follow-up.
This reminds of the difference I perceive between, say, 17th century Dutch golden age art and, say, Jackson Pollock. The former requires the artist to master skills and techniques honed and handed down by others in a long-standing tradition--but is also an art form that demands a skill set. For me, this is Craft. The latter invents its own idiosyncratic skill set and places more emphasis on the artist's individual inspiration, rather than on their mastery of a tradition (though nevermind that abstract art is now its' own tradition).
Hmm, I don't know enough about either Dutch art or Pollock to respond well to these very interesting remarks. I do know that people who paint stuff that makes people at the gallery go "My 2-year-old could do that!" often have a very deep understanding of traditional forms--the old know-the-rules-before-you-break-them saw. Although I also see what you mean, that the "mastery of a tradition" is being deemphasized there.
So many things I don't understand, honestly. What is "inspiration"? Is it inspiration when you throw white paint on the floor but not when you add it as light on a sleeve? What I do know is that if you said "You can own a Pollock or you can own a Vermeer," I would take the Vermeer.
I don't know very much about art, either. But my time working in an art supply shop helps prejudice my opinion of an artist who ignored the quality of the materials they were using in favor of realizing a personal vision. I prefer both, at the same time, please. ;-)
"Both at the same time" is a pretty good slogan. :-)
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