Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping: Summary & Key Insights

When I talk about 'craft,' I’m not referring to an eternal checklist of elements every good story must have. Craft, as it’s typically defined in the West—character, conflict, plot, showing versus telling—is a cultural system, not a natural law. These conventions emerged from specific traditions, like the Aristotelian arc or modern realism, which privilege certain emotional rhythms and moral arcs. Yet we often teach these techniques as if they were universal, and in doing so, we encode an implicit hierarchy of expression.

I encourage writers to see craft as relative. A pause, an omission, a communal voice—these might carry as much narrative meaning in one tradition as tension or plot reversal does in another. What we call 'good writing' is a negotiation between writer and reader, shaped by shared expectations. Once you realize that, craft becomes larger, more democratic. It’s not an abstract system hovering above culture; it’s culture itself, in motion.

In the classroom, this means teaching students to articulate what aesthetic choices serve which effects, in which contexts. Craft is what a story does, not what a story should be. Its value is relational, not absolute.

Every culture tells stories differently because every culture has different ideas about what stories are for. Western pedagogy may teach that a story must have an individual hero who undergoes change, but many other traditions value continuity, collectivity, or cyclical time. A story that resists climax, that ends in ambiguity, or that centers the communal rather than the individual might be misunderstood in a typical workshop, not because it fails but because its goals differ.

In my experience, this misunderstanding can silence or distort marginalized voices. When writers are told their stories lack 'arc' or 'stakes,' they are really being told their ways of seeing the world don’t align with dominant expectations. That tension reveals how deeply our notions of craft are intertwined with ideology. Once we recognize this, we can open up new ways to read and write. A workshop can become a place of translation rather than correction, where writers explain the logic of their cultural forms and readers learn new kinds of pleasure. Storytelling is not one-size-fits-all. It is a dialogue between histories.