Craft

Craft, to me, is the skill part of writing, the part you can analyze and learn. It’s techniques, viewpoint, grammar, and style. It includes the mechanics of characterization, dialog, description, and action, as well as highly macro-level things like plot and pacing, worldbuilding, backstory, and characterization. It involves practically every angle from which one can look at and evaluate a piece of writing with any objectivity. It is, after all, fairly easy to determine whether someone has slipped from first person to third person, mis-tagged their dialog, or written grammatically correct sentences.

Craft is so endemic to writing, and so fundamental, that it is easy to confuse it with the Art part. This leads to two related problems: first, people trying to find a more objective definition
of “good art” latch on to elements of craft as a way to measure artistic merit; second, people who want a recipe for writing focus on craft (because they can learn it) and think that the craft part of writing is all they need to get right.

The elements of craft are easy to talk about, though not necessarily easy to define or implement. They are, after all, the skill set that writers need to at least partially master. One can argue endlessly over exactly where the line goes between an omniscient viewpoint and limited omniscient, or what makes “transparent prose” transparent, or how much and how often to vary one’s speech tags. It’s also easy (and often very tempting) to count the number of adverbs-per-page and assign an arbitrary limit, thus plunging headlong down the slippery slope of making rules and recipes for “good writing” that are a lot harder to quantify when the subject is how much beauty or creativity one needs per chapter.

Unfortunately, it is quite possible for a story to be technically excellent without being artistically so. A novel can be well-constructed in every measurable aspect and still be boring – and a boring story is definitely not good art, and probably not good craft, either, however well-made it may be in its other aspects.

Similarly, a story may contain many horrible technical mistakes and still be considered “good art.” I recently read a memoir that, judging from the reviews, was fantastic Art … but by my standards, it was terrible in certain key elements of craft, most notably consistency, pacing, and structure. I lost interest halfway through. I doubt that this was the effect the author intended his book to have.

Technical writing skills alone are thus manifestly not enough to create a successful piece of writing (unless the writer has their own idiosyncratic definition of “successful” and doesn’t much care whether their work gets read or sells). Strong writing skills can, however, compensate to some extent for weak artistry, just as strongly artistic work can cover a certain amount of weak skill levels. Ideally, of course, one would have both strong technical skills and strong artistic ability in equal measure, but even among experienced writers at the height of their careers, this is rare. For beginners … well, there are geniuses who are gifted with both skill and artistry right from the start, but they are rare. Don’t count on being one.

Skills of any sort generally have to be learned, usually through much practice, and writing is no exception. This is where the common wisdom about writing “a million words of crap” comes from – the necessity of practice. However, getting a million words worth of practice at writing crap does not automatically improve your skills. One has to work at improving, not merely at producing words.

“Work at improving” does not mean that one allows one’s Internal Editor free rein at all times; that will, more than likely, slow one’s production (and therefore rate of improvement) to nearly zero, as well as being intensely frustrating. It does mean that at some point one has to evaluate what one has produced, figure out what the flaws are, and attempt to correct them on the next try. In some cases, “the next try” means the second draft; in other cases, it means the next scene of that type that one happens to write. It’s another one of those places where every writer has to figure out for themselves what the best way of learning is for them, whether that ends up being writing entire stories, doing highly structured exercises, reviewing each scene as it is written, or something else.

There is a subset of beginning writers who take the opposite tack from the one described above. Instead of deciding to create a bunch of skills-based rules with which to quantify “good Art,” they decide that only Art matters and skills are unimportant (or perhaps that skills will be acquired automatically, without their having to do any work beyond writing whatever comes into their head). This rarely ends well. A blacksmith who has a marvelous concept for a wrought-iron railing, but who is unskilled with their tools, will likely have a lot of difficulty in realizing their vision, if indeed they succeed in doing so at all. A blacksmith who knows exactly what they can do with their tools, and just how far they can push their limits, may well start with the same marvelous concept and see ways to elaborate on it and improve it that the unskilled smith doesn’t realize are even possible. There is a reason why writing is often called “wordsmithing.”

Also, as I mentioned before, skills don’t arrive automatically and without effort. They especially don’t arrive automatically in the lap of someone who thinks they are unimportant and pays no attention to improving them. (Which is particularly short-sighted, since skills are learnable and Art … not so much.)

For writers who, like Emily Dickinson, are perfectly happy to write something and then stick it in a drawer for their heirs to deal with, or who are fine with posting their work on a free web site where six people will read it (five of them friends and relatives), the art and the craft are all they really need to pay attention to. Those of us who wish to write professionally, however, have to keep an eye on the third leg of the three-legged stool: the business. Which comes up next week.