"Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world. What writers used to say to small circles of students in an attempt to help them improve their storytelling technique has become a familiar way, often parodic and self-knowing, of interpreting the grand and not-sogrand narratives of our time."
"The most intense distillation of this system of thought (if you can even call it that) has always been the craft book, the writing manual. These are sometimes written by the most successful in the profession (like Ursula K Le Guin's Steering the Craft) or the most successful at advising the profession (Robert McKee's Story) but most often they are put together by novelists and screenwriters towards the close of their academic careers as creative writing tutors."
The private language of creative-composition workshops now permeates public cultural interpretation and often becomes parodic and self-knowing. Terms such as trope, POV, backstory and character arc have migrated from classroom coaching to descriptions of national and political narratives. Craft books represent an intense distillation of workshop thought, produced by practitioners, advisers and longtime tutors. The typical craft-book voice is chipper and cheerleaderish, using a second-person narrator to make the process of composing a book seem possible. One craft-book opening bluntly declares that nobody knows how to compose a book and admits a personal dislike for craft books and their cosy consensus.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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