And I came to writing fiction, in the first place, out of being an art student. From the beginning, I wanted to make stuff. I wanted to make paintings and sculptures. And so the idea of artifice and craft and artificiality seemed really like the baseline condition of my gesture to begin with. The idea of verifiability or objectivity-these characteristics that writing inherits not from the arts but from journalism or scholarship-those weren’t native to me in any way. I was a failed student. I had never written a thesis, let alone a dissertation. I’d never done any journalism. I wasn’t even a person who kept a journal. I just wanted to make stories.
Tag Archives: Craft
More or less completely at sea
I think what I’m ultimately trying to say is that it’s dangerous to say too much too definitively about craft in the abstract. If you feel absolutely overwhelmed by a project – that’s good. If you have absolutely no idea how or where to begin – that’s good too. No matter where one is in one’s career, a writer, it seems to me, ought to feel more or less completely at sea as they begin to approach the question or the subject they hope to address. There are two kinds of repetition. There is the kind we find inside our work, the themes that burble up lava-like from our subconscious again and again, and which we cannot resist and should not, I think, criticize in others. And then there is the repetition that ought to be resisted, that which gives us a program, a strategy that can be applied to any subject. This we should criticize in others. Art should never be the result of habit, it should strive eternally for the fresh and the new even when we work in forms we did not invent. Craft, we should vigilantly remind ourselves, means to make something absolutely new where before there was nothing at all.
The Remainder Table 