Narrator: Imagine being a young writer in a prestigious MFA workshop. You've submitted a story where, deliberately, the characters' races are not specified. During the critique, the feedback is nearly unanimous: you must explicitly state that your characters are people of color. The workshop participants, who are mostly white, explain that "the reader" needs to be told. Yet, in that same room, no one ever demands that the white writers identify the race of their white characters. Whiteness, it seems, is the silent, invisible default. This very experience happened to author Matthew Salesses, and it became a catalyst for a profound investigation into the hidden rules of storytelling. In his book, Craft in the Real World, Salesses dismantles the long-held assumptions about writing, arguing that the very tools we are taught are not neutral, but are instead deeply embedded with cultural biases that have the power to silence as many voices as they claim to empower.

Narrator: The foundational argument of the book is that the idea of "pure craft" is a myth. Writers are often taught a set of rules presented as universal truths: "show, don't tell," use "invisible" dialogue tags like "said," and create "three-dimensional" characters. But Salesses reveals that these are not universal laws of nature; they are a set of cultural expectations.

For example, the advice to use "said" as a dialogue tag is effective only because readers in the Western literary tradition have been trained to see it as invisible. Salesses imagines a writer from a culture where "queried" is the common, invisible tag. In a Western workshop, that writer would be told their dialogue tags are distracting, a sign of amateur craft. They would be told to "know the rules before they can break them," which in practice means they must first adopt the dominant culture's value system.

This isn't an accident; it's a product of history. The modern creative writing workshop, modeled after the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was shaped during the Cold War. Its founder, Paul Engle, saw American literary craft as an ideological weapon to promote democratic, capitalist values against Communism. Craft was never neutral; it was designed to serve a purpose. By presenting these culturally specific conventions as "pure craft," the literary world inadvertently normalizes one perspective—typically that of the white, middle-class—and treats all others as deviations from the norm.

Narrator: If craft is a set of expectations, then the crucial question becomes: whose expectations? Salesses argues that every act of writing is a rhetorical one, aimed at a specific audience. Writers make choices that create what's called an "implied author"—the version of the author the reader imagines from the text—and this persona is in conversation with an "implied reader," the perfect audience who understands every nuance as intended.

The problem is that the default "implied reader" in the literary world is often assumed to be privileged. When a workshop gives feedback for "the reader," they are often unconsciously picturing a white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied person. This has profound consequences.

Salesses points to Chinua Achebe's famous critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Defenders of the novel often claim it should be read for its craft, not its racist content. But Achebe argued that the racism is the craft. The craft choices—giving complex interiority to the white narrator, Marlow, while treating African characters as a faceless, silent backdrop—reveal Conrad's assumption that his reader shares his colonialist worldview. He felt no need to provide an alternative perspective because his implied reader already agreed with him. This demonstrates that craft is never neutral. The choices a writer makes about who gets a voice, who gets described in detail, and whose perspective is centered are all part of a conversation with an imagined audience.

Narrator: The place where writers are supposed to learn their craft—the workshop—is often the very place where these harmful dynamics are reinforced. The traditional model, which often employs a "gag rule" silencing the author during discussion, is built on the premise that the workshop's job is to reflect the work's intention back to a supposedly unaware author.

However, this model is hazardous. By silencing the author, the workshop is free to project its own biases onto the work, often misinterpreting it entirely. For a writer of color, a queer writer, or any writer from a marginalized background, this can be devastating. They may be told their work is "unbelievable" or "confusing" simply because it doesn't conform to the workshop's limited set of cultural expectations. They are pressured to write not for their intended audience, but for the workshop itself.

Salesses shares how his most valued instructors were those who could see his stories as he meant them, who approached each story on its own terms. He cites author Nami Mun, who told him she runs every workshop differently because every story is different. The goal shouldn't be to force a story into a pre-existing mold, but to understand what the author is trying to achieve and for whom. The real danger of the MFA system, Salesses concludes, is not that it produces a single style, but that it trains writers to write for a single, homogenous audience.

Narrator: After deconstructing the old model, Salesses offers a new vision for the workshop. The goal, he argues, should not be to "fix" a product, but to inspire the writer to re-engage with their own creative process. The author, not the workshop participants, should be at the center.

He presents several alternative models, such as Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process, which uses a structured, four-step method to give the artist control over the feedback they receive. Another powerful alternative is a question-based workshop. Instead of offering opinions and suggestions, participants are only allowed to ask the author neutral questions about their work. This shifts the focus from evaluation to inquiry, helping the author clarify their own intentions.

Salesses provides a powerful example of this principle in action. A student in his novel-writing class submitted only four very rough pages. A traditional workshop would have been useless, likely tearing apart the prose. Instead, Salesses centered the discussion on the author's process. He asked her about her goals, her vision for the novel, and the challenges she anticipated. The class discussed potential structures and models, generating a list of questions to guide her forward. The student left not feeling defeated by a flawed product, but inspired to continue her process. This is the ultimate goal: to help the writer see and re-see for themselves, providing them with tools they will use long after the workshop is over.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Craft in the Real World is that craft is not a set of immutable laws to be mastered, but a series of conscious choices to be made. It is about moving from a state of unconsciously absorbing cultural expectations to consciously engaging with them. The book is a powerful call for writers to understand where the "rules" they follow come from, who they were designed to serve, and whether they truly serve the story they need to tell.

The ultimate challenge Salesses leaves us with is not to abandon craft, but to redefine it. It's an invitation to ask ourselves: What are the unwritten rules that govern my own creative work, and who do those rules truly serve? By answering that question, writers can reclaim their own context, not as a deviation from the norm, but as the very source of their power.