Chapter 1
Mastering the Craft
Craft enables art.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Skilled professionals make what they do look easy: Think of a major-league hitter driving a ninety-six-mile-per-hour fastball over the outfield wall, or a soprano singing a high C. Think of your favorite author composing one eloquent, magical sentence after another. It can be hard to see through the apparently effortless art to the skills underneath. This is especially so with writing, where we can’t get inside a writer’s mind to see the choices being made as he works.
Writing instruction these days tends to focus on the finished product: In thousands of workshops and classes, drafts are “workshopped,” critiqued, discussed, revised. What interests me, though, is not what we write, nor why we write, but what we are actually doing when we write. What skills are we using? What is it that professional writers know how to do that inexperienced writers do not?
These questions have preoccupied me for most of my teaching life. My breakthrough came one night many years ago when I was listening to a Boston Red Sox baseball game on the radio. I realized that hitting a baseball is a complex skill. I thought about how athletes (and musicians) train. Their coaches break down complex skills like hitting a baseball or playing an instrument into their component parts. Then they teach each one of those component skills, one at a time, until eventually the entire complex skill is mastered. So an aspiring major-league hitter might start by practicing keeping his eye on the ball, then work on the position of his feet as he swings, then add the two together. A singer might begin by practicing the pitches of the diatonic scale, then learn to articulate language sounds, then combine the two. As these thoughts went through my mind, it suddenly became clear to me that, once you can break down any complex skill into its component subskills, then—ah, then!—you can teach those skills. So it is with sports and music; so—I realized at that moment—it can be with writing. From that night on, I devoted myself to developing a practice-based approach to teaching writing skills, one I now call The Mastery Path for Writers.
But what are the component skills that make up the complex work of writing? It took me many years of teaching and thinking to come up with a satisfactory answer to that question. Naturally, others had anticipated me. One of them, the nineteenth-century English writer Matthew Arnold, described the work of writing like this: “Have something to say, and say it as well as possible.” I eventually put it this way: When we write, we need two main sets of skills—“content skills” and “craft skills.” Content skills are those we rely on to come up with things to say: They depend on the well-trained mental faculties of creativity, imagination, memory, curiosity, and others, as well as on our ability to establish a natural relationship with our readers. Craft skills depend, among other things, on an understanding of how to use language with precision and power.
Content and craft skills are the yin and the yang of writing: You have to have both. Every good writer must be able to come up with things to say, and must have skill with words to communicate those things. So, what are we doing when we write? We are exercising our content and craft skills … or, at least, we’re doing that if we indeed possess those skills.
Having been a writing teacher for decades, I know that many aspiring creative writers are so busy churning out pages of works-in-progress that they have never taken the time to learn and develop their skills. But if you just keep doing the same thing over and over, are you really going to get any better? There’s another way—a much better way—to become a good writer.
Mastering a Writer’s Skills
If you’ve ever learned to play a musical instrument, or a sport, you’ll remember your teacher or coach showing you the component parts of a complex skill and how to practice each one separately before putting them together. The scientific researchers studying how certain people achieve greatness have now demonstrated that this kind of teaching and learning is essential to acquiring expertise.
Just like athletes and musicians, writers can break down the complex activity of writing into its component skills; we can practice each skill on its own, then combine it with others. Our content skills can be developed through practices that train our creativity, our powers of observation and imagination and curiosity, our subconscious, our storytelling voice, our ability to be in relationship with our readers. I’ve provided such practices in my first book, How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play. When we do these practices, we don’t think about our words at all; we concentrate on using whichever faculty we are trying to train.
As writers we also need practice in shaping our work. We need to know how a novel works, if we want to write one, or how a personal essay is best constructed, if that’s our chosen genre. If you need skills in this area, there are plenty of how-to books available to help you.
Finally, we need to know how to use the English language, with precision and with power. Over the three decades of my teaching career, I have learned that many aspiring writers have no idea how language works or how to use it well. They may have great ideas, their minds may be filled with wonderful stories—but they can’t communicate those ideas or stories because they don’t know anything about words! They don’t know that words have different qualities and histories and music; they don’t know all the various ways words can be patterned. In their ignorance of their medium, they are like would-be painters blind to the difference between cadmium red and cobalt blue, or sculptors unable to feel the difference between granite and marble.
So here, in this book, I’ll be inviting you to set aside all your ideas and stories, all your knowledge of genre, and to concentrate entirely on language. I’ll be asking you to let go of what I call “content mind” and instead put all your energy and attention into learning to use your “word mind.” I’ll be showing you how to take a learning journey into the realm of what I like to call “word craft” or “sentence craft.”
On this journey you’ll acquire, through guided practice, expertise in two areas: choosing words (diction), and arranging words into effective sentences (syntax). You’ll also get an introduction to sentence rhythm, one element of the music of language. (Although I love the whole world of verbal music, it’s a subject that needs its own book.)
In order to develop the practices in this book, I had to do them many, many times, by myself and with students. I can assure you that, done faithfully and with attention, they will make you a better writer.
First, you’ll vastly expand your repertoire of choices for words and sentence construction.
Second, as you experiment with making these choices during practice, you’ll gradually discover the ones you prefer, the ones that sound and feel “right” to you. And by “right” I don’t mean mere grammatical correctness (though that is important); I mean “right” in the sense that those choices give your writing power and let you articulate your visions, tell your stories, keep your reader spellbound … in short, “right” in the sense of making successful magic with language.
Third, over time, you’ll find yourself able to make these choices while you are engaged in writing or rewriting a draft. Having trained your skills in practice, you can now use them in your work.
Fourth, as you exercise and train your craft muscles, you will also be strengthening and freeing your creativity. Contrary to a prevalent view, creativity is not simply self-expression. It is not just “going with the flow.” Creativity is making something, bringing something into the world that did not exist before you made it, whether that “something” be a hand-knit sweater, or a handmade table, or a poem, or a sentence. It is through this making, and only through this making, that you find yourself as a writer. Pam Allen, a professional knitter and writer, tells novice knitters: "Creativity is less about being born with a friendly muse and more about putting time and effort into developing know-how. Granted, moments of inspiration can wake you up at 4:00 in the morning, but rarely do they happen unless you first lay the groundwork. … By learning, practicing, and mastering your art and craft, you become creative.”1… you become creative. Pam Allen, Knitting for Dummies (For Dummies, 2002) p. 10. Her words apply to writers as well. Through the discipline of learning the craft, through training and exercising your linguistic abilities, you free your creativity.
Fifth, the more you practice making choices in diction and syntax, the more you discover your authentic voice on the page. Like creativity, the concept of “writer’s voice” has in recent years become hostage to psychology. Writers in search of voice are exhorted—sometimes even pressured—to dig deep into their psyches, to excavate their worst memories. This is nonsense. Listen instead to John Fairfax and John Moat, founders of the well-respected Arvon writers’ workshops in England: Voice, they say, is a writer’s “individual use of language which enables him at last to come at the material which only he can express. It is the hallmark of the accomplished writer and his or her unique authority.”2… and his or her unique authority. John Fairfax and John Moat, The Way to Write, p. 3.
A writer's voice, then, is the result of the choices a writer makes about words and about how to put them together. Some of these choices are, naturally, unconscious. But the more you become aware of the possibilities of language open to you, the more you expand your repertoire of choices. And so, as you learn more about how to make these choices, and as you experiment with making them in different situations, you will also, inevitably, develop your own individual voice—or style—on the page.
Making these choices, let me assure you, is not a chore, once you get the hang of it. On the contrary, to exercise your skill with words is one of the great pleasures of being a writer. Think of the satisfaction a tennis player feels when his racket meets the ball at precisely the right angle and sends it just out of reach of his opponent; think of the satisfaction a vocalist feels when she hits a high note dead-on. Writers get that same sense of satisfaction when they find exactly the right word or phrase to make a sentence sing or to drive home its meaning.
If I haven’t yet convinced you that mastering the craft of sentences is a worthwhile endeavor, let me add a few more benefits to the list:
- Learning sentence craft will definitely make you a better writer. You will develop a conscious understanding of the skills you need to write well, and if you conscientiously practice, those skills will serve you every time you sit down to produce a piece of writing. If your goal as a writer is publication, mastery of sentence craft will set you apart from many other aspiring writers.
- Learning how to craft sentences is empowering. Being able to make use of the power of words will make you a stronger and more confident person, on the page and in your life.
- Working with words keeps your brain alive. If we don't make regular use of our language abilities—if we don't exercise and stretch those particular “muscles” in our brains—those abilities will disappear. Even if we never get published, keeping our language abilities “in shape” means that we keep our brains active and healthy.
- Learning the craft of sentence-making is pleasurable. Just like playing tennis for fun, or singing in a choir, playing with words is an enjoyable activity. And the more we learn about how words work, the better we understand what writers we love are doing on the page—which deepens our enjoyment of their work.
- Learning how to make powerful sentences will give you skills you can use, if you wish, to benefit others. When you know you can communicate well, you will have the confidence to speak about, and write about, matters that are important to you.
- Learning to make skillful sentences can lead to success in work and in life. Several recent studies have shown that employers rate lack of writing skills as the number one problem with their employees. If you master the craft of sentence-making, you will provide yourself with a highly marketable skill.
What You Need to Master Sentence Craft
Mastering the craft of making sentences requires very little in the way of equipment: a dictionary, a thesaurus, a grammar book for reference purposes, and a notebook and pen, or a computer.
What you really need are two things: a desire to learn, and a willingness to practice.
I urge you as well to consider abandoning a great deal of what you were probably taught in school about writing. Let yourself begin anew in the world of words, using only your desire to learn and your innate ability to play with words and make sentences.
One of the most wonderful things about writing is that it’s never too late to begin, or to begin again. If you want to play football, or to sing opera, you might have a hard time getting started with those activities later in life. But (given good health) our language brain remains with us all our lives, and it’s never too late—or too early—to wake it up and use it.
There’s a lot to learn about the craft of using words; this book aims only to present some basics. At the same time, learning the basics can take you far on your journey as a writer. And to learn these basics, all you need to do is practice them.