How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Craft
By Nonfiction Editor Steph George
Natura Morta: Cranio e Banana by Francesco Biccheri
Well, this is it – substance comes toe to toe with craft. I’m not much of a hand on writing about writing, but it occurred to me that my last two craft blogs have had almost nothing to do with craft. Not that anyone is keeping track (right?), but it seemed that I should actually try to stay on topic this time around.
For most of my writing career, like a lot of young writers, I felt constricted by structures, formats, and prodding questions about my choices. Why this word? Why that scene? Why are the curtains blue? I found these formalities and questions annoying and pointless. In fact, I outright ignored them. A standard five page essay? No thanks, I’ll be writing a series of imagined love letters between Nurse Ratched and Dr. Spivey for my sophomore English class instead.
I relied solely on my own outsized perception of the profoundness of my ideas, and the good will of whoever was reading my work. To be fair, this actually worked pretty well, and I don’t discourage anyone from doing it. There is a somewhat stifling nature inherent in craft. And when we step back and look at it, good craft is quite often relative and entirely subjective. But at a certain point, writing with no guard rails can feel stifling in its own way.
Anyone reading this surely knows the feeling of opening a blank document with no plan and watching the curser blink, blink, blink… Suddenly all the compelling ideas and perfect sentences that floated through your brain over the past week are gone, and you have no idea where to start. Something as simple as a format, theme, or adherence to style can not only provide a jumping off point to get that curser moving, but I have found that it actually gives me room to be inventive in a substantive way. If nothing else, it provides a false, reminiscent whisper of my teenage rebellion. What’s more motivating than that?
The way I’ve been embracing this as of late is to, when I’m tasked with a new writing undertaking, choose a piece of writing I admire that has some overlap in topic or idea. I dissect it, plotting out each part; not just for how it reads, but for how it functions. Then, simply put, I copy it. Not the content of course – I’m not endorsing plagiarism. What kind of editor do you think I am? I copy the layout of a sentence, mirror the structure of a chapter, or replicate the flow of an article. With everything mapped out in front of me, I can chart out my own ideas in a way that works. It’s in this space that I find I am actually, annoyingly so, my most creative.
By streamlining the process of how, I’m able to more readily get to the heart of the what and the why. And when I feel the walls of whatever structure I chose inevitably start to press in on me, that’s when I know it’s time to ball up the map, throw it out, and get down to writing, substance and craft enemies no more.
Steph George is the Nonfiction Editor of Barnstorm Journal and an MFA Nonfiction Creative Writing student at the University of New Hampshire. She’s a freelance writer and audio producer in Dover, NH.