In the introduction to Best Amer­ican Short Stories 2019, Anthony Doerr tells an anecdote about how his first encounter with craft mucked up his writing, made it worse, ruined his fun. For a school writing contest, he decided against submitting his harebrained story about a dog and a candy truck, opting instead to write a new story that conformed to the strict constraints he had discovered in a book on craft. The new story was awful, and so was his ex­perience writing it. The takeaway is that writers must be bold. 

But this idea, that writing principles are constraints to be broken rather than techniques to be mastered, isn’t very bold itself anymore. It appears so often these days, flattened and exaggerated by college writing courses and essays like Doerr’s, that it has become more truism than truth and more hindrance than help. Bill Mesce, Jr., for example, wrote in this magazine in 2016 that the advice “show, don’t tell” is “more or less bullshit.” Ron Tanner came to the same conclusion in this magazine almost two decades earlier, arguing that techniques such as using concrete detail and avoiding authorial intrusion “made no more sense than a dress code and, in fact, were just as arbitrary.” In the Nov./Dec. 2020 issue of Poets & Writers, James P. Blaylock seems to mock E.M. Forster for trying to comprehend the structure of a Henry James novel and praises his own boyhood method of “simply writ­ing what came into my mind to write,” unconcerned with “technique,” a word he seals safely in quotation marks, lest anyone mistake the term as his own. 

Likewise, in the edition before Doerr’s, Roxanne Gay uses her introduc­tion to The Best American Short Stories 2018 to undermine the old maxim that writers keep their politics out of their fiction, even though, she laments, “some writers stubbornly cling to the idea.” In Best American Short Stories 2020, the edition after Doerr’s, Curtis Sittenfeld claims in her introduction that she doesn’t believe in “rules” but endorses “foundational ingredients” such as structure, character, and lan­guage. Doerr makes a similar qualifi­cation, admitting he understands the basic sense driving “the rule makers,” as he calls them: “backstory risks slowing down frontstory, it’s true, and time-jumping risks confusing the reader, and stories with moral stances risk becoming preachy.” I’m out of my depth among writers as talented and successful as these, but I can’t help won­dering at the semantics of these distinc­tions. What’s the difference between a “rule” and a “foundational ingredi­ent”? If backstory really can slow down frontstory, then what is the substance of Doerr’s objection? Does his warning against “becoming preachy” make him one of the writers Gay is criticizing, “stubbornly cling[ing] to the idea” that fiction should avoid political stances? Or are these writers all fighting straw­men and bogey monsters? 

To me, these distinctions indi­cate nothing as much as how deeply engrained anticraft attitudes have become. Even authors who believe in technique—as Doerr and Sittenfield confess they do, however obliquely—must protect their credibility by first swearing off “the rules,” rebuking “the rule makers,” and then pretending to talk about something else. This seems especially egregious with Doerr, one of my favorites even among Pulitzer Prize winners; he himself is a master of craft and uses it very conventionally in his anecdote about the childhood writing contest. The opening line, for instance, establishes character desire—“As a boy I dreamed of becoming a writer”—and the rest of the paragraph develops a conflict—“I figured I had as much of a chance of growing up to be one as I did of growing up to be a blue whale.” The writing contest brings the conflict out of his head and into the story’s action, raising the stakes. The sequence even ends in epiphany—and in a conscien­tious reference to epiphany that shows Doerr’s facility with the principle: “I was like the boy at the end of ‘Araby,’ alone in the darkening bazaar, my eyes burning with anguish.” He uses craft strategies, in other words, to argue against craft strategies, just after admit­ting the validity of craft strategies. 

If that doesn’t seem entirely contra­dictory to you, it’s probably because you have enough command of these issues to appreciate the nuance of Doerr’s meaning. But to those who are still developing that command (or, like the boy in Doerr’s story, are being exposed to it for the first time), the only message is that writers must reject impositions on their natural story-making impuls­es—unless they are masochists for drudgery or toadies to authority. Doerr even conflates this anticraft attitude with the intensifying rebellion against the Trump presidency, asserting that the bold narrative techniques in his anthology “push back against tradi­tion,” “fight to allow marginalized sto­ries to be told,” and offer evidence that “the resistance is always happening.” The anthology’s authors and material accomplish these things, certainly, but the implication is that we strike a blow against injustice by refusing a craft con­vention like maintaining a consistent perspective, whereas accepting the principle that your character should not wake up and discover that the whole story was a dream—well, that’s like accepting racism or income inequality or lies from a tyrant. One is heroic, the other blind conformity. This is the mes­sage that has hardened into mythology for many of today’s young writers.

That’s not to say there’s no truth in it—just that it’s a narrow truth, one that has been taken too far. Doerr seems to be objecting to the stringency of “rules,” not the ideas behind them. Many writ­ers, similarly, such as Mesce and Tanner in their Writer’s Chronicle essays, object to the absurd prescriptions from a more rigid era, when first person point of view seemed risky and present tense narra­tion made writing professors collapse onto their fainting couches. But surely, we can separate those kinds of arbitrary conventions from more enduring strate­gies with more noticeable benefits, such as concrete detail and authorial invisibil­ity, can’t we? Even if authorial intrusion was in style a century and a half ago, before the advent of Realism, and even if it makes a heady appearance once in a while in today’s literature, surely, we can separate that from a novice’s clumsy miscues, then offer the novice a few useful tips, can’t we? Do we have to abandon a concept simply because an exception to it exists? Even John Gardner—who likely qualifies as one of Doerr’s “rule makers,” being the author of an aged book purporting to instruct young writers on craft—admits on the very first page of The Art of Fiction, “Most supposed aesthetic absolutes prove rel­ative under pressure. They’re laws, but they slip.” The point is that they’re use­ful, “especially when applied in obvious ways,” not that they’re absolute.

I imagine that these writers perhaps had teachers who didn’t adequately convey that flexibility, whose rhetoric included words like “always” or “never.” We writing teachers are always contend­ing with these kinds of rigid ideas in our students, passed along at lower levels: never use first-person in a formal essay, put a comma anywhere you sense a pause, always keep your point of view consistent. They are shortcuts, of course, ideas that simplify matters for writers who don’t have the time or ability to make more nuanced judgments, and it’s easy to expose them as flawed and dogmatic. But that doesn’t mean they serve no purpose, or that students at lower lev­els would be better off exploring the complicated morass beneath each of these recommendations. They are only preliminary lessons, placeholders in the students’ development, an increment of advancement that can be further advanced when students are more capa­ble of parsing the details. And yet it’s easy to look back at those teachers and feel that they’ve lied to us—or, as teach­ers ourselves, to promote such notions as we work to undo previous lessons. But secondary teachers have different students and, therefore, different objec­tives than professors of creative writing. Most studied education, not writing or literature, and their instructional obligations extend far beyond our own interesting little debates about likeable protagonists. My wife, for example, teaches eighth grade English, and she’s about to begin a unit on the Holocaust, which most of her students have never heard of. Later they’ll work on how to fill out a job application and write an email with complete sentences. If pithy advice about commas or point of view helps make room for these units, so be it. That’s why education continues.

At higher levels, however, we often assume that young writers have already picked up craft fundamentals some­where. “In my twenties I encountered many more rules for writing short sto­ries,” Doerr writes. “I’m guessing you probably have too.” Why? Doerr is an award-winning and bestselling author who has been invited to govern the most prestigious annual short story anthology on the continent. He is, by almost any measure, one of the most successful writers in the world. Why would he assume that the average read­er, or even the average aspiring writer, has made as vigorous a study of creative writing through childhood, college, and beyond? 

Even if they have, it’s still possible that they’ve never been adequately grounded in the craft principles that Doerr and others reject. Introductory college courses are usually too brief and too broadly aimed to offer anything but a quick overview, which even the best students can promptly forget. They’re also typically taught by grad­uate students still getting the hang of craft fundamentals themselves. These instructors often have no experience and little desire to teach. Some don’t even have a background in creative writing—I didn’t. A day of teaching is something to get through by hook or by crook, often the latter, and criticism and dismissal offer a big shield to parry the assaults of student inquiry. But these dismissals can also come from more established faculty.

Creative writing has been part of higher education for a long time now, which has helped foster the assump­tion that it can be transmitted, piece by piece, just as more straightforward disciplines can. Creative writers caught in colleges and universities can grow bitter after encountering that assump­tion too often, so they start to resist the idea that the alchemy of art can be captured in a syllabus, which makes it easy to denigrate the fundamentals they are supposed to be teaching. Moreover, experienced writers often understand craft so well that they exe­cute it without thought, the way they drive a car two decades after those first white-knuckled lessons in Mom’s sta­tion wagon. As Gardner explains, “the true writer is one for whom technique has become, as it is for the pianist, sec­ond nature.” In other words, it’s a skill that operates beneath their conscious thinking, which makes it easy for them to believe it doesn’t exist. Even writers who know it does exist down there somewhere, however, can be reluctant to examine craft too closely for fear that they’ll yank the whole apparatus out of place and lose their flow. That’s fine for their writing, but when these writers are called upon to offer instruc­tion, they might lack either the ability or the willingness to impart their deep knowledge of craft, and so their only option is to dismiss it. They usually like to recommend vaguer virtues, such as boldness, or to describe the mysterious and intuitive nature of art.

But young writers haven’t developed that second nature yet. They are, in fact, still trying to distinguish what separates the published stories they love from the rank amateurism of their peers, and these lessons put them at risk of believ­ing that nothing at all does. It can leave apprentice writers rudderless, craving instruction or, worse, giving up on it. Rather than approaching fiction as they might approach a trumpet or a box of oil pastels, many young writers are con­ditioned to view it as a poker game—sometimes your cards come up and sometimes they don’t, but the import­ant thing is to manage your demeanor. Any attempt to actually influence the outcome, they think, is either primitive superstition or abstruse intellectualism, and the two seem equally embarrassing. These writers often enter my classroom with a kind of cool nihilism: “Plot used to be a big deal to me as a reader and writer, but then I met my mentor for my thesis,” one student wrote in his opening reflection last winter. And they are often shocked at the relief they feel as they study craft techniques and incorporate them into their work. “This is the first writing course (surprisingly) where I feel like I am truly gaining an understanding of how to develop and create a good story,” a different student volunteered on a discussion board, unprompted, two weeks into the course. 

The writers who continue to resist craft, on the other hand, are prone to believe that anything intuitive is unim­peachable, and they often have no idea how to improve the writing they put on the page. They tend to cultivate an atti­tude of defiance (mistaking it for bold­ness), resist criticism, and, ultimately, stagnate. Later, they can become bitter when gatekeepers and institutions refuse to appreciate their “writing out of a sense of wonder and fun,” as Blaylock advocates in Poets & Writers. There is certainly value in wonder and fun, but only with certain foundations in place and only taken so far. Gardner again: “What Fancy sends, the writer must order by Judgment.” Studying craft is one way to develop that judgment.

To be fair, these studies really can be stifling, and incorporating them often does make one’s writing worse—temporarily. Asking promising young writers to practice craft is like asking promising young basketball players to practice their left hand. Their drib­bling will look worse, their lay-ups will look worse, and their brains will be so overloaded that their decision making will look worse. It might make them look like they don’t know what they’re doing. It might even make them lose a game—or a writing contest. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. They are suffering through a temporary difficulty to shore up a weakness, to master a new skill that will propel them to greater success. They might miss the fun of the playground while they’re doing it, but this is what it means to pursue an activity beyond recreation. 

Likewise, implementing new craft techniques might feel awkward and dif­ficult, but avoiding them imposes more limitation on writers than practicing them. In basketball and in writing, a good coach doesn’t abandon funda­mentals when the players complain about fun. A good coach makes sure the players see the bigger picture and understand the purpose of the drills. A good coach recognizes exceptions but doesn’t use them to tear down proven techniques. A good coach has their players practice until the techniques are internalized, until they no longer require any rational straining to execute and can emerge more naturally. A good coach knows that playing well comes from working hard. 

And I think Doerr knows it too. And so do Gay and Sittenfeld, Tanner and Blaylock, and every other writer who has mastered craft fundamentals, moved beyond them, and then, being called upon for their authority, has wor­ried about looking like their literary par­ents. Today’s author-teachers are boxed in by the cogent craft instruction of Gardner, Forester, Flannery O’Connor, Janet Burroway, Jerome Stern, and many others, which can make it dif­ficult to find anything original to say. Being called upon to contribute to the discussion, we have nowhere to go but outside the box, and so we lumber over to the fresher pastures of antagonism and irony. We’re storytellers, after all, and the narrative territory is much more fertile when we place ourselves in opposition to the rules. Suddenly, we are no longer an agent of our institution but a rebel within its walls. The conflict is implicit, and our virtuous mission is to free others from the institution’s oppression. To pursue art requires a sig­nificant measure of rebellion, and this is part of what we’re trying to confer to young writers, but if we’re honest, we’ll admit that we like seeing ourselves this way—defying conventions, struggling against the status quo. “I’ve always had a problem with authority,” Tanner begins his 1997 anticraft essay in The Writer’s Chronicle. Yes, yes. So have I, and so have most other writers, and it’s tempting to revert to this position when we find ourselves disoriented by our own positions of authority. 

That impulse, however, might also suggest another kind of conformity. Gardner, O’Connor, and others describe an intellectual movement, mostly with­in universities, that has long been treat­ing the basics of storytelling as passé, declaring the novel dead, marveling at the shifting colors of the avant-garde, and delighting in the metafiction that mocks Realism. Gardner and O’Connor casually dismiss these as academic con­cerns (though Gardner was himself one such metafictionalist), but many writers working within the Academy don’t have that luxury. These figures are our friends and colleagues, shaping the climate of our workplace and the expectations for our social discourse. It’s easy for creative writers, already operating under the sus­picion that we are something less than bona fide academics, to fear exposing ourselves if we advocate too eagerly for simple fundamentals. As years pass, that advocacy can indeed feel stultifying, and it becomes appealing to edge away, to develop more provocative and criti­cal stances, to join the crowd panning those simpletons who still obsess over the oldest, humblest, least intellectual facets of the enterprise, calling objec­tions at them such as:

Show, don’t tell? You must show AND tell! 

Well, yes, of course, but as a principle, it’s generally—with exceptions!—better to show. “The weather was glorious” is not adequate for establishing the weather. “Rosa felt jubilant” is not adequate for establishing Rosa’s jubilation. These statements can be interestingly contradicted, exemplified, even ven­triloquized, but not without rendering them through description or behavior. That doesn’t mean you need to write a whole scene. Scene versus summary is a different issue entirely. Both can show. It doesn’t mean you can never “tell.” It simply means, as O’Connor explains over and over again in Mystery and Manners, building on the instruction of Henry James and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, “The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.” 

Don’t be political? Everything is politi­cal! 

Well, yes, of course, but that doesn’t mean a story will work if its only point is that the fire station needs more fund­ing or that Republicans are hypocrites. Writing stories with political relevance is different from writing stories for political advocacy. As Stern instructs in The Shapes of Fiction, “Readers gener­ally react negatively when they sense that stories are set up for propaganda purposes.… If you want to move an audience to a certain point of view, remember that the story that maintains its own complexity and integrity will be the most persuasive.” The best way to do that is to dig beneath simple polemics and illustrate the dilemmas from which they arise, to transcend the concerns of the moment to reveal something deeper and more permanent, something that will still be relevant in ten years, when it finally appears in your collection, or in twenty, when a new reader picks it up. You can achieve that through stories about underfunded fire departments and unethical politicians, but not if the story’s only goal is to paint a villain, deliver a moral, or influence a ballot. 

Build a plot? I prefer to pursue the truth! 

Well, yes, of course, but why treat plot as an obstacle? These craft elements are not dishes at a buffet; you do not have to forego the bread rolls to save room for prime rib. They are an ecosystem, each element functioning in harmony with the others, even as they compete with and devour each other. Take away the predators, and the system will become unbalanced, unhealthy. Plot does not mean high action. It need not entail car chases, explosions, or gunfights. It is simply the complication and develop­ment of the conflict, even if the conflict is as quiet as a boy wanting to be a writ­er without knowing how. Introducing a writing contest is plot. Sending the boy awry with new craft concepts is plot. Letting him lose the contest is plot. Those developments don’t prevent the truth from arriving—they push the story toward it.

Not always!

No, of course not. But let’s not con­fuse that with “never.” 

J.T. Bushnell is the author of the novel The Step Back. His short fiction has been published in Passages North, Iron Horse, The Missis­sippi Review, and many other literary journals, and his essays about writing appear in Poets & Writers magazine, The Science of Story from Bloomsbury Press, and Fiction Writers Review, where he’s a contributing editor. He teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.