Find Another Way

Steve Mitchelmore has the right response to the kind of "advice" dispensed in most primers on writing, such as Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, which according to reviewer Emily Barton, helpfully focuses "on potentially challenging topics: dialogue, narration, even where to take paragraph breaks. (I wish she’d included one on getting characters in and out of rooms.)":

Reading this, I felt relieved to be the kind of writer who worries only about one of these topics. I think: if you're uncomfortable with dialogue, don't write it! If you have a problem with paragraph breaks, don't use them! Find another way. And if you have a problem moving characters around, let the reader.

In other words, "craft" is important only to the extent that knowing something about it might help you understand when it's best to dispense with it.

On the other hand, Prose herself does seem to appreciate that creative writing courses can take you only so far, as evidenced by this statement quoted by Barton:

“The advantage of reading widely, as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules, is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.”

I agree with John Hawkes about the role of craft and convention in the writing of fiction. Hawkes said this: "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."

Comments

[Jonathan Mayhew]

How do you get characters in and out of rooms? I've always admired this part of the fiction writer's "craft." It seems entirely mysterious to me, a mere poet. Does the door work? Or can really, really skilled fiction-writers just sort of make their characters materialize in a room out of thin air?