On Literary Craft and Its Limits

You’ll often hear it said that writers, like artists, are born, not made. Having something urgent and vitally human to say means worlds more than being able to explain how we avoid dangling participles or what a motif is. To be a writer means to have something at the core of you that not only clamors for expression, but insists on and ultimately achieves just that expression, in such a way that others can receive it. True enough.

So, then, why should writers learn craft? This is kind of like asking why you would want to meet a date with your hair combed, clothes clean, and teeth brushed. Craft enables achievement. Craft expands appeal. It smooths the meeting between you and your reader, so you can find out more about whether you might be compatible in a deep sense. There’s a natural irony here: you present yourself well to increase your chances of finding someone who can love you at your most disastrous. But that’s a fruitful paradox. Craft creates surfaces that get us past the surface. Used well, craft proceeds from surface to substance and, in that act, teaches us to find and foreground the best in ourselves — as well as to be honest about the worst. When craft turns out a product that is unmitigated hollow surface, it has betrayed its own reason for being. Superficial craft is like a bad lover: perfidiously promising to steal you the moon, to turn all your hours henceforward into one continuous rapturous symphony, only to abandon you with a fake phone number on your nightstand and a forgotten crusty toothbrush beside your sink.

But what, really, is craft? Craft, in prose, is techne: tools for doing, and some degree of baseline knowledge about how to do, your work. It doesn’t always imply a single best way, but rather a set of possibilities and various methods you might try under given circumstances. In writing, craft consists of several nested sets of grammatical, dialectic, and aesthetic strategies for producing effect, communicated in a context of general but socially contingent knowledge about how different effects might land with different audiences. In practice it can be difficult to separate people’s sense of how to produce an effect from their sense of why an effect might be thought desirable. But the separation is real and can be made.

Craft can be compared in some ways to a toolbox. A toolbox is not a set of values. Nor is a toolbox the application of those values. A toolbox represents a range of possibilities. In non-artistic areas of human life, tools are necessary for utilitarian projects, like having a working HVAC in a professional office or a sanitary sewer system in a city. Sure, the placement of a priority on these things implies some underlying values, like “People should be able to work in relative comfort” and “Human waste is best kept at a distance from human dwelling places.” So you can say in a sense that the toolbox, and still more the worker employing the toolbox, has to embody the values. But toolbox and worker, by themselves, don’t guarantee the successful application of the values. Tools can be put into the service of values, but they can also be turned toward mere pointless tinkering, as well as toward horrific ends like torture. Nobody sane wants that — which is why we need to think well beyond the issue of craft — but first we need to finish exploring what craft actually is.

Let’s continue with our analogy. A toolbox is (implicitly) full of things you can learn to do, but it does not tell you in what manner or at what speed you have to do them, or for what reasons you should, or whether and if so how one thing is better to do than another. What I am getting at is that tools are not the same as training, and training is only acquired through practice and relationship. This is why the best toolbox for you as a craftsperson will be, not the one stuffed with the greatest diversity of items, but the one that contains all and only those tools best suited to every good purpose to which you are — or can and should become — trained to put them. Craft is training plus toolbox.

Toolboxes as they are kept around your workshop, after you unpack the original crate from the store, do not contain blueprints or instruction manuals. Still less do they contain treatises on why and how to do one type of project instead of another, or on the principles of building, or on specialist techniques. Craft workshops may and arguably should contain these kinds of writings, which indicate certain values. Teachers can model and embody and instantiate values from which a student is free to, and arguably sometimes should, disagree or differ or depart. But tools themselves are neutral. They are passive, extrapersonal, multivalent, pluripotent — yet inert. Products of previous agency, they imply things you could and might do, or learn to do. But they have no agency until someone with agency comes along and decides to put them to use.

To shift the ground of the analogy, while sticking with the idea of tools that imply but don’t guarantee purposes: Craft might work for the writer the way a suction device works for a dentist or a diagnostic manual for a psychiatrist. Craft directly empowers a professional to do his or her job well. It strongly implies, but by itself it doesn’t instill, the knowledge of when, where, or why to do the job. And yes, “A job should be done well” is a value, but it’s a value at a level all human beings across time and place can affirm. It’s on when, where, and why well-done work is necessary and desirable that we begin to differ.

Put it all another way: Craft, in writing, is a set of varied linguistic and perspectival techniques that can be used for producing specific effects. Like any concept, craft is susceptible of multivalent culturally bound expressions, and can be put to work in a variety of thoughtful, fruitful ways. Craft is expansive rather than delimiting. No single iteration of a crafted work, however flawless, can foreclose on any future development of art. Nor can any single work ever fully prescribe or circumscribe the purposes to which craft can be put.

Okay, but really, what is craft in writing for? Producing effects, yes — but why? This is where we can no longer avoid observing that individual writers, working within diverse historical and global literary cultures, will hold diverging and sometimes conflicting values as to what makes literary art good in the deepest sense. We can’t converse about aesthetic goodness in this deepest sense without accepting that we may sometimes clash. We may have to get past the consoling fiction that all of us see and intend good in the same uncomplicated ways and senses. We may also have to get past the unsettling, but equally fictional, fear that good might not ultimately mean one unified kind of thing common to all people across time, place, and difference. That is to say we are eventually going to have to cross over from techne, knowledge of how, to episteme, knowledge of what and why.

Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and the author of As Earth Without Water, a novel (Wiseblood Books, 2021), Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord (Catholic Truth Society, 2021), and Fragile Objects, stories (Wiseblood, 2023). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society located at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.