Something I find very frustrating in the writing/reading community is the almost total lack of craft discussion. And I think it ties into AI a little, and I’ll get to that.
I wish I could say things were different before some specified time, but to be honest, I’ve always had a hard time finding people who want to discuss the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of writing craft. Discussing Craft, discussing what tools are available and how and why to use them, what effect they caused and how a different tool or technique might have a different effect, etc., etc., etc., is legitimately the best way for any artist to learn, but I see a lot more posts about “Here’s how you get that glossy effect on shiny tile floors” and lists of brushes to download and such like from visual artists than I do from writers.
This all resurfaced recently because an old friend of mine mentioned once again the dire state of the criticism landscape, in that all discussion about a piece of media and what it does and how it does stuff is flash-in-the-pan these days. Comes out right around release of the Thing as some kind of review of whether you should/shouldn’t interact with it, and no one wants to talk about it a month later. Obviously, this is detrimental to genuinely thoughtful critiques and careful dissections of a piece of media because that stuff takes time and thought, but I wish I could say it surprised me.
Most audience members for really anything are not the critiquer types. They don’t really think that deeply about how media works and why. They want a thumbs up or thumbs down, and a lot of the time they don’t even care why or how that was the conclusion, or even why that conclusion applies or who it applies to. That’s…fine. It’s not how I do things, but hey, fine.
But this does contribute to the overwhelming void of writers’ and storytellers’ craft and skillset being discussed. Because if no one cares, and it doesn’t seem to directly contribute to marketing or sales…it’s not going to be a focal point.
How someone sewed a story together matters so much more than their ingredient list. You could hand two people the same recipe for macarons and that does not mean both will be equally successful, because macarons are fucking hard. A blueberry muffin and a blueberry donut do not require the same skillset and they do not have the same effect on people.
And goddammit, AI slop is just a list of tropes blended into a slurry with absolutely no craft or intent to make anything. You don’t have a muffin or a donut. You have Slop.
You can eat Slop if you want to, I guess, but it’s not real enjoyable.
And to make less Sloppy things, you gotta figure out how to actually make a muffin or a donut or whatever the hell else you wanna make. And to properly advertise against Slop, you’ve got to talk about how everything should be fluffier than your last book because you’ve been working very hard on your egg-beating by hand. Because AI can’t beat eggs at all.
But when people don’t talk about Craft, people never learn how to talk about Craft even though it’s now a feature of fighting the Slop. A lot of people don’t even know how to consciously use it.
Some years ago, a fanfiction writer I was friends with at the time kept bragging about how “prose-y” her writing was, because someone had mentioned in a comment that they really liked how she used prose.
If you know what the word “prose” means, you are currently staring at your screen as flabbergasted as I was at the time. “Prose” is not a quality or component or technique. It’s literally just…narrative writing. The commentor basically said “I like how you write.” Which is nice. But the reader was so unable to articulate what they liked specifically that they just found a fancy way to say “Hey, I really liked that!” and the writer was so unaware of craft that she thought that was a specific compliment about something specific in her style.
There’s a place for “I really liked that” and it’s definitely fanfiction. But even in fanfiction, there’s a reason people want to read their 42 coffeeshop au about the same two damn characters, and it’s not because of the unique tropes. It’s because this author characterizes Blorbo Jones with a sharp staccato sentence rhythm that really invests you in the way he thinks, and that other author describes that coffee bar so well you think they may have actually built one and good god do you feel like you live anywhere they set a story.
And it’s not just casual readers and marketing execs and journalists or hobby fanfiction writers and such that have utterly blinded themselves to how writing Works.
Let me illustrate with another anecdote that still frustrates me: some years ago on Twitter, I asked people for their recs for books they were impressed with the craft of, because I desperately wanted to delve deep into excellent craft for inspiration. Approximately one, maybe two, people of the probably dozen or more responses—and they were not fandom people, they were mostly original writers of some stripe or another—had any idea what I was even talking about. I was flooded with responses of “I don’t know what that means, but I liked...”
But there are things I think were skillfully, excellent crafted that didn’t quite jibe with my soul, and there are things that I absolutely frolic around in that...are...eh. Well. They were assembled somehow, at some point, even if it has the workmanship of a Cybertruck. I tried to explain to some responders, and they genuinely had no idea how to gauge what the skill of a book looked like.
Things that make me want to frolic have some positive points to hone in on, but fundamentally I do not want to make a fun, comfy, but deeply structurally unsound treehouse. I like making fancy complicated treehouses that don’t even rock when you jump in them that use all sorts of fun tricks to make new kinds of joists and ooooh look at that floating staircase, how did you even make that?
But a lot of people are just like, “That was fun,” and stop there. And that’s okay. It is. But it’s such a predominant flavor of media response right now that...everything else seems to not matter. I can remember one multi-trad-published author who loved to talk up his books in terms of tropes and how he wanted to try to write something reminiscent of basically every genre of anime. And yet when I tried to read his multiple books, they kept hitting wrong every time because all of his seams were showing and loose nails were jabbing at me. He blended tropes up into chunky soup and forgot he was supposed to be writing a story, not marketing something.
If the appeal of a story was a list of tropes/components in it, I would be equally satisfied with a TvTropes page as a I am with a book or a manga or a TV series. And I’m not. I’m quite certain most people are not. And that means the ingredients aren’t what matter, it’s how they’re mixed and baked, and people only ever want to go, “Ooooh, love that you used vanilla frosting!”
I think a lot of authors might be more confident and find their own style and voice if they...knew how to recognize what those things are, and what they consist of. Because it consists of your little funky writing quirks. How you pick your metaphors for characters early and how you pick each of your settings to match what’s going with that motif and the character’s internal state. It’s how you always give your character a moment alone before or after a hard conversation so that you can debrief your reader on the situation and pause before or after and intense moment to handle so the character and the reader can take stock and introspect and give them moments to feel. It’s how you spin your three-time phrasal repetition into repeating sentences into repeating paragraphs because it gets bigger and bolder with each repeat of the idea, and it needs to be repeated three times like a fractal growing ever larger.
Not what’s in your chunky soup.
As a writer, I love hearing that you like my staircase or my nice treehouse floor. But what I really crave, what will really send me through the moon, especially from my editors and critique partners and whatnot, is not “Wow your floorboards are nice and sturdy,” but “Oh, goddamn I love how those weird joists are giving the floor just the right amount of bounce.”
Because fucking I worked hard on that shit, and I want people to notice the actual work, not just the results. For the most part writing craft should be invisible. You don’t want people noticing how things are built if they’re not looking for it, because that means you Fucked Up probably at least 8 times out of 10. Keep your seams inside the shirt with all the messy, knotty tie offs flattened into the hems to keep them from being visible and rubbing against any sensitive skin. I love when I manage that.
But people paying attention to the blood, sweat, tears, and soul I poured into something, finding all that work, acknowledging it, and maybe even wanting to learn from it? That is a kind of ascension to a holy land that is unachievable by simply providing a seamless experience.
And not only is it how other writers learn…it’s how I learn. I need to know what feels off and weird as well as what went fucking fantastically because…that’s how I know what techniques I pulled off well, and what would maybe be better off saved for a different effect because that’s not what I wanted.
Literacy rates are some of the highest they’ve ever been, but comprehension is such and writing craft is such that people don’t think anything of it more than they let words spill out of their mouth unthinkingly.
But stories aren’t put together unthinkingly. They don’t just spill out. Not good ones. Not ones that matter.
