
Craft in the Real World
Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping
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Narrated by:
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Matthew Salesses
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By:
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Matthew Salesses
About this listen
This national best seller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review).
The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing - including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability - and aspects of workshop - including the silenced writer and the imagined reader - Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces?
Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian-American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, "When we write fiction, we write the world".
*This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF including the complete Appendix of Writing and Revision Exercises and a Bibliography from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2021 Matthew Salesses (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
While writers might disagree over showing versus telling or plotting versus pantsing, none would argue this: If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you. That's where The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes in. Veteran literary agent and expert fiction instructor Donald Maass shows you how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers.
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Read this if you're a writer
- By Reed Ramlow on 08-08-20
By: Donald Maass
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Pretty Things
- A Novel
- By: Janelle Brown
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan, Lauren Fortgang, Hillary Huber
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Nina once bought into the idea that her fancy liberal arts degree would lead to a fulfilling career. When that dream crashed, she turned to stealing from rich kids in LA alongside her wily Irish boyfriend, Lachlan. Nina learned from the best: Her mother was the original con artist, hustling to give her daughter a decent childhood despite their wayward life. But when her mom gets sick, Nina puts everything on the line to help her, even if it means running her most audacious, dangerous scam yet.
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SO GOOD
- By sandraleeweston on 04-28-20
By: Janelle Brown
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The Hitchcock Hotel
- By: Stephanie Wrobel
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Gail Shalan, Helen Lloyd
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Alfred Smettle is not your average Hitchcock fan. He is the founder, owner, and manager of The Hitchcock Hotel, a sprawling Victorian house in the White Mountains dedicated to the Master of Suspense. There, Alfred offers his guests round-the-clock film screenings, movie props and memorabilia in every room, plus an aviary with fifty crows. To celebrate the hotel’s first anniversary, he invites his former best friends from his college Film Club for a reunion. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in sixteen years, not after what happened. But who better than them to appreciate Alfred’s creation?
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Hitchcock would make it a movie
- By Michael Ferris on 10-13-24
By: Stephanie Wrobel
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Greenwood
- A Novel
- By: Michael Christie
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire.
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tedious boring trite
- By Marc Buchalter on 11-19-21
By: Michael Christie
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She's Not Sorry
- By: Mary Kubica
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Meghan Michaels is trying to find balance between being a single mom and working full time as an ICU nurse, when a patient named Caitlin arrives in her ward with a traumatic brain injury. They say she jumped from a bridge and plunged over twenty feet to the train tracks below.
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Boring….
- By Courtney Charles on 04-29-24
By: Mary Kubica
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The Minders
- By: John Marrs
- Narrated by: Katherine Press, Oliver Hembrough
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 21st century, information is king. But computers can be hacked and files can be broken into - so five ordinary people have been selected to become Minders. Transformed by a revolutionary medical procedure, the country's most classified information has been taken offline and turned into genetic code implanted inside their heads. Together, the five know the truth behind every government lie, conspiracy theory and cover-up. In return, they're given the chance to leave their problems behind and a blank slate to start their lives anew. But not everyone should be trusted.
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Don’t start here!!
- By Paige Stewart on 03-15-21
By: John Marrs
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Murder Your Employer
- The McMasters Guide to Homicide
- By: Rupert Holmes
- Narrated by: Neil Patrick Harris, Simon Vance
- Length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Who hasn’t wondered for a split second what the world would be like if a person who is the object of your affliction ceased to exist? But then you’ve probably never heard of The McMasters Conservatory, dedicated to the consummate execution of the homicidal arts. To gain admission, a student must have an ethical reason for erasing someone who deeply deserves a fate no worse (nor better) than death. The campus of this “Poison Ivy League” college—its location unknown to even those who study there—is where you might find yourself the practice target of a classmate.
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Great idea; not so great book
- By Michael Ferris on 03-06-23
By: Rupert Holmes
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Park Avenue Summer
- By: Renée Rosen
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur, Renée Rosen
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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New York City is filled with opportunities for single girls like Alice Weiss, who leaves her small Midwestern town to chase her big-city dreams and unexpectedly lands a job working for the first female editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown. For Alice, who wants to be a photographer, it seems like the perfect foot in the door, but nothing could have prepared her for the world she enters.
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It’s Beach Read Season
- By Boots on 05-23-19
By: Renée Rosen
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When Crickets Cry
- By: Charles Martin
- Narrated by: Adam Verner, Charles Martin
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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It begins on the shaded town square in a sleepy Southern town. A spirited seven-year-old has a brisk business at her lemonade stand. But the little girl’s pretty yellow dress can’t quite hide the ugly scar on her chest. Her latest customer, a bearded stranger, drains his cup and heads to his car, his mind on a boat he's restoring at a nearby lake. The stranger understands more about the scar than he wants to admit. And the beat-up bread truck careening around the corner with its radio blaring is about to change the trajectory of both their lives.
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Soooo boring...and preachy.
- By Melanie on 03-05-20
By: Charles Martin
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Getting It Done When You're Depressed, Second Edition
- 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track
- By: Julie A. Fast, John Preston
- Narrated by: Stephanie Cannon
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Getting It Done When You're Depressed offers 50 strategies to break the cycle of inactivity that so often accompanies depression. These strategies are practical and easily applicable for anyone trying to lead a lifetime of productivity, regardless of your mood.
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Great advice, horrible narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 04-05-21
By: Julie A. Fast, and others
Salesses brilliantly illuminates the link between culture and what is considered “good” writing craft; offers alternative, more inclusive and story-oriented methods of workshop critique; and rounds things out with a number of questions and exercises for writers to use when revising their work, to help make conscious the unconscious craft decisions writers make when drafting a story.
This book is organized into essays, and designed so that if a reader chooses not to read the chapters in order, they can jump around in the text and still understand the topic at hand even if they’ve not read the previous chapters. As such, some information is repeated, but I found it helpful for retaining what I was learning rather than off-putting.
I don’t usually write reviews, but this book is important for the writing community at large to read, as it questions the fundamentals of what we’re taught—and how we’re taught it—in western writing workshops and MFA programs. It also offered context for struggles I’ve had in workshops where I wasn’t a member of the workshop’s majority demographic, explained why such issues arise, and suggested methods to help mitigate them. I hope to someday try Salesses’s alternate workshop structure, which fosters critical thinking and making conscious story decisions, and centers the writer and their intention for the work, rather than the workshop reader’s opinions of what the work should be.
I found this book while looking into alternate story structures from the Hero’s Journey, and it delivered that and so much more. This is a book I intend to own in hard copy, ebook, and audiobook, and one I’ve already begun recommending to all my writer friends. (For the record, they’re enjoying it too.)
A must-read for writers!
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Great Thoughts on Craft
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Very informative read for writers!
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I learned nothing about writing and nothing about the world. The worst part is, I can picture the author's smug, knowing grin as he reads this review and discounts it as mere bigotry and ignorance. How nice it must be to be so insulated from criticism that you can write a book as bad as this one and be taken seriously. Now THAT'S privilege.
Give this one a miss.
Utterly Useless
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