On Craft
The World Is Not Vague: Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact, Assay 5.1
"The world is not vague. The world is extraordinarily precise. One of the tasks of nonfiction is simply to pay close attention to that world, and to record what we observe with precision and accuracy. It is part of the nonfictionist’s pact with the reader. As a reader, I don’t turn to nonfiction to hear, for example, that summer is hot. I turn to nonfiction to learn how hot, what kind of hot? Are we talking California autumn hot, which smells of eucalyptus and fire? Or Minnesota August hot, which smells of melted road tar and fish? Which summer is this, hot to what degree, how does this writer know, why should I believe them, why should I care, what can they tell me about the world?"
Solitude Narratives: Toward a Future of the Form, Assay 8.2
“(A too-loud clot of WRITERS at a too-small table in a too-warm hotel bar. Lights up on COLLEAGUE and WOMAN WRITER. In a tone that drapes its patronization in syntax as subtle as a rhino sweeping past in a gauzy evening shrug, COLLEAGUE starts in.)
COLLEAGUE: You’re an extremely independent woman.
WOMAN WRITER: As opposed to what?
Like any other nonfiction project, this one began with a question: why does everybody seem to think my habit of wandering around and writing stuff down is weird? As habits go, it seems reasonable enough; and there’s certainly a long, rich, and fairly well-established literary tradition of people doing exactly that. The language of that tradition had long since infiltrated not just literary and cinematic parlance but common use; from the Hero’s Journey to every varietal of epic, odyssey, and narrative quest, from On the Road to Wild, from Bill and Ted to Thelma and Louise, the narrative of wandering off—which provides an almost irresistibly seamless structure, to say nothing of motive, momentum, character, warrant, and voice—is deeply embedded in both literary and popular consciousness.”
Misc. Things an Essay is Not, Essay Daily
“Where does an essay come from, as opposed to a poem, or fiction, or theology, or limericks, or tirades for or against?
What it feels like here in this particular body: the easiest poems come crashing out the front of my head, always present, incessant, asserting themselves and spilling all over the page. The hard poems come from deeper, somewhere central to the core brain, and the best come from digging in the brainstem at the base of my skull.
Prose, I tell you, I must hop in a skiff and go sailing down into the belly of the beast, myself, the whale.
Anyway, not all that one finds in the guts is ‘personal.’ It’s often just what we know deeper down, by the instinct we have for stories and words. And, lacking any real language for how the body works and why the mind knows, I have resorted to 'guts,' 'brain,' and 'skiff.'“
All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, 10.1
If you don’t care about your reader, you don’t need to worry about how deliberately you write, or how well, or for whom, or if your work will affect them in any way; and if you are that writer, this article is not intended for you. But, dearly beloved, I trust that we are gathered here today to think about this thing called craft; which leaves us to consider not whether we want to our writing to reach a reader and to have impact when it arrives, but rather how.