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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- By supermantwo on 08-31-20
By: Jeremy Dauber
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Directing Actors
- By: Judith Weston
- Narrated by: Judith Weston
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In this essential guide to acting, internationally renowned directing coach Judith Weston demonstrates what constitutes a good performance, what actors want from a director, and what directors do wrong. She also goes over script analysis and preparation and how actors work, and she shares important and helpful insights into the director/actor relationship.
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Directing Humans
- By Jacob Moore on 10-15-19
By: Judith Weston
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
- The Untold History of English
- By: John McWhorter
- Narrated by: John McWhorter
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar. Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.
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Great for casual linguists
- By Bertie on 01-11-10
By: John McWhorter
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Not what I expected but useful
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Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels
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What makes a romance novel a romance? Writing a well-structured romance isn't the same as writing any other genre - something the popular novel and screenwriting guides don't address. The romance arc is made up of its own story beats. Told in conversational (and often irreverent) prose, Romancing the Beat is like sitting down to coffee with romance editor and author Gwen Hayes while she explains story structure - the way she does with her clients, some of whom are regular inhabitants of the best-seller lists.
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short but full of great information
- By Voracious Reader on 06-24-17
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What listeners say about Craft in the Real World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- TaitVox
- 01-27-22
A must-read for writers!
A must-read for writers, especially participants of writing workshops.
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.)
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- Anna Battle
- 10-27-21
Great Thoughts on Craft
Some great thoughts on rethinking workshop and the value of craft on our culture and world. There are some opinions presented as fact in this work, but the author does a good job backing up most of their points with facts and statistics. They make some assumptions and claims that some readers and writers will disagree with, but the wealth of information and activities in this book are worth its perusal alone. If you are teaching writing in the modern western world, you would do well to give this a listen.
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- J
- 11-25-22
Very informative read for writers!
I enjoyed this book, as it helped me to think about things I did not know existed in the writing world.
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- Courtney Withers
- 09-23-23
Utterly Useless
The only things I learned from this book are that everything is racist and this author is VERY impressed with himself. Whoever told him that the reductionist, racialized, trite, jargonny catchphrases he repeats over and over again are interesting or worthwhile has done a disservice to the world.
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.
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4 people found this helpful