Disenchanting the Literary:
Genre and Craft in the Creative Writing Workshop

by Patrick THomas henry

I think of it often, the bleakness of realism, its insistence on cruelty and callousness. How it spellbinds young writers, just setting foot in writing workshops. How it stiff-arms us into inflicting harm on our stories, our readers, and our own art. In the coda of Atonement (1999), Ian McEwan’s narrator, Briony Tallis, invokes a stand against the strict dogma of the real to justify a revisionist history, in which she indicts herself for a false accusation against her sister’s lover. In the novel she’s revised throughout her adult life, she crafts—as penance—a reunion that fate denied them. “There was a crime,” the elderly Briony notes, after an evening in which the extended Tallis family celebrated her birthday by staging The Trials of Arabella, a short play Briony wrote as a child (349). Still, Briony is aware that the first waves of dementia are already eroding her memory; she has little time to set the narrative to rights. Briony goes on:

But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. [. . .] It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. [. . .] Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? (349-51)

In service of the bleakest realism. I was an undergraduate when I first read Atonement. I was living on-campus, in a dorm room with dubious air-conditioning during a Pennsylvania summer suited only for the breeding of mosquitoes and the pervasive smell of asphalt. I was supposed to be drafting pages in advance of a novella workshop, which would ultimately become part of my senior thesis. I had a stack of research culled from county historical societies and grainy print-offs from microfiche readers; I was equipped with a reading list of grim greats, all those deaths that leave Tolstoy’s prose a cemetery of Slavic names and the self-defeating smugness of Updike’s New Englanders and the terminal sarcasm of the Bill Buford-christened dirty realists.

And there was the stack of books I wanted to read: Agatha Christie detective novels, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance novels, Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, Ursula K. Le Guin’s short stories. Worlds in which grief and death were tempered by the solutions to mysteries, camaraderie against impossible odds, a hope for a better earth, and keen-eyed philosophy.

But there was no space for such hope, such fancies, in the bleak realism demanded in the workshops. We had to speak of stakes, urgency, losses, pain, damages, paralysis—a litany of soul- (and story-) crushing hexes. And anyone abiding by that rhetoric of high seriousness, I realized, was forfeiting the true magic of prose.

I know this reeks of irony: that a largely literary, historical, realist (but still quasi-meta) novel like Atonement is the touchstone that began disenchanting the “literary” in my writing life. But I’d hazard that few aspiring writers set out to peddle exclusively literary fiction: for many of us, genre fiction—that expansive parasol—sheltered us from the blazing sun of childhood and teen stressors. We also recognized our own struggles in those narratives.

Despite that, many writers who came of age in the ’80s, ’90s, and the aughts had to inter their love of genre fiction in the sepulchers of their imitation JanSport bookbags or their bookshelves at home. In public library reading events, English classes, and AP lit courses, well-intentioned teachers and librarians insisted that realism meant literary, which in turn meant quality. Genre fiction wasn’t “real,” therefore it wasn’t “literary,” and therefore we took nothing meaningful from the act of reading. This vaguely moralizing approach to literary fiction was reinforced by how some of our most venerated public institutions curated their collections. Karen Russell reflects on her own childhood of reading in the Miami-Dade Public Library in her essay “Engineering Impossible Architectures.” She writes:

if a book was identified as HORROR/FANTASY/SCI-FI, it got quarantined behind the beanbag chairs and labeled with a sticker of a cross-eyed dragon. A fat dragon in bad need of an optometrist—this was how I came to think of myself, as a consumer of fantasy and horror books. I developed the false ideas that, first, there was some essential division between the kinds of books I best loved and “Literature/Fiction” and, second, that there was something deeply suspect about the absorbing pleasure of “genre.” (198)

Russell’s verb selection here is significant: quarantined. Yes, one could argue that the genre versus literary divide is an unfortunate victim of the library’s need to classify information. However, that verb alone signals notions of genre purity, that any proximity to genre will contaminate the literary.

Perhaps, then, it’s little surprise that libraries can play out-sized roles in magic realism, horror, and the detective novel, to name only a few. Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library and Stephen King’s The Library Policeman both hitch their protagonists’ gradual unraveling to a few harrowing hours in the library. And there’s Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” in which the pursuit of a perfect text and comprehensive knowledge leads librarians to madness.

However, when readers become writers, those internalized dismissals of genre fiction can poison their writing—especially in a workshop. Russell notes how the workshop experience, twined with the pretensions and expectations of literary realism, withered her craft and her style:

When I took my first creative class, I wrote many stillborn stories about matters pertaining to the “real” world: adultery and dinner parties, zero dragons. If my favorite traveling outfits as a young reader had been rabbit fur and jaundiced Frankenstein skin, now I wore nude pantyhouse and sensible pumps. (198-9)

Russell’s sartorial point is this: sensible attire is sensible only if it’s truly comfortable for the writer. If your literary tastes hew toward Chuck Taylors and urban dystopias, then the patent-leather, kitten-heel, Nine West pumps of office-job realism are going to pinch something awful and blister your feet six ways to Sunday.

Russell isn’t alone in feeling this pressure to conform, stylistically. In his craft book Thrill Me, Benjamin Percy recounts an experience similar to Russell’s:

On the first day, the professor reviewed the syllabus, listing off the dates, required readings, and finally announcing that there would be no genre submissions. Then he asked if we had any questions. His shaved head and expressionless face made him look a little like a mannequin.

“What do you mean by no genre?” I said.

He leveled his dead gaze at me and said, “I mean no genre. No vampires, no dragons, no robots with laser eyes. Do you understand?” He took off his glasses and scanned the room. “Does everyone understand?” (3-4)

Percy’s scene is only missing the swaying, bare bulb of an interrogation room. That authoritative pan of the room only drills home the message: in the workshop, we write stories, and stories behave, dress appropriately, and drily tell us about “real” lives.

My first day in an undergraduate fiction workshop wasn’t much better, but sub Percy’s bald, bespectacled man for another: one who wore a brown, corduroy blazer over a blue button-down, the collar and top few buttons undone. He kept his beard neat, trimmed, and his skin was sun-bronzed, weathered. By appearances, he split the difference between academic and hip. We met him in the library’s conference room, a wood-trimmed space with tall windows that let in broad slats of light. At first blush, not exactly the murky horror-sphere of Murakami or King. Our professor split his stack of syllabi like a deck of cards and dealt them around the broad conference table. He read through the syllabus. When he arrived at the list of acceptable story topics, he tabled the syllabus on his fingertips, as if it were a relic on display. His instructions were blunter than Percy’s teacher: “You’ve got to learn to tell real stories first,” he said. “So no magical quests. No prophecies. No enchanted swords. And no fucking dwarves.”

He had delivered the word of binding, shackled us to the class expectations. No genre, as Percy’s teacher had said. We were cursed into “real stories”—whatever the hell that meant.

In Thrill Me, Percy endeavors to mediate the schism between literary and genre fiction. Writers can learn from both, he contends, especially if we situate the conventions of each as strategies, rather than orthodoxies. Percy writes,

It’s easy to grouse and make fun. Flip the equation and study what works best instead. Literary fiction highlights exquisite sentences, glowing metaphors, subterranean themes, fully realized characters. And genre fiction excels at raising the most important question: What happens next? What happens next? is why most people read. It’s what makes us fall in love with books and makes some of us hope to write one of our own someday [. . .]. (17)

So, in literary fiction, we can revel in the beautiful, the crafted, the ornate—what Oscar Wilde prized in poetry. Conversely, genre fiction reunites many writers with the pleasure that got most of us reading in the first place—what Ian McEwan (again in Atonement) calls “the childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens” (296).

Yet, there’s a single, seemingly innocuous directive in Percy’s statement that raises my hackles: study what works best instead. In principle, I agree with that idea, with its implied invitation that the aspiring writer trust and fall back on their own judgment. However, the workshop imbues that word “best” with those sinister undertones of the instructor’s vision of craft. It also invokes the gatekeeping of the annual anthologies, those Best American titans. Without questioning their own intents, practitioners of a traditional workshop pedagogy will take Percy’s “study what works best instead” and use it as cover for the pithy maxims and mantras they know well—a point Matthew Salesses makes in discussing his book Craft in the Real World (2021) with Candace Eros Diaz at Craft Literary.

In other words, I see the word “best” and I know what haunts it: that old workshop specter, Raymond Carver’s essay “On Writing” and its wail that we simply “write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power” (24). It’s the instruction manual of banal workshop fiction, implicitly coded white and suburban and mid-century middle-class.

If good intentions and “study[ing] what works best” aren’t enough to dispel the rhetoric of literary realism in the workshop, then what is?

At the risk of making my rhet/comp colleagues fist-bump the air, it might be time to channel a bit of Peter Elbow. I’d argue it’s not enough to change our pedagogical catch-phrases. We’ve got to abandon “best” and a teacher-driven pedagogy for one that centers on strategies, choices, and the young writer’s will. What Russell, Percy, and I share is a bruising twelve rounds with a workshop that centered a single vision of what qualified as writing. There was no space for dragons, no space for thrillers, no space for hauntings and premonitions, no space for, well, space. The student-writers could be anyone, except themselves.

True, that frustration can drive some writers to produce remarkable and innovative work, simply to spite the so-called rules. Sarah Gailey writes of this, in a brief craft note in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019, edited by Carmen Maria Machado. There, Gailey reflects on the impetus for their story “STET,” which first appeared online in Fireside Fiction. “STET” itself is a hybrid-form piece, in which a grieving parent’s narrative unfolds in the footnotes of a technical manual on autonomous vehicles, sentient AI’s, and the algorithms that determine the vehicles’ actions. While our temptations might be to read the story as retaliation against the future hellscape of automated cars bankrolled by Elon Musk, Gailey describes a rather different origin for this story: “‘STET’ was a labor of spite,” Gailey writes. “I wrote this story after a conversation in which someone professed skepticism at the ability of a writer of genre fiction to read literary fiction and explore form in a similar fashion to a ‘literary’ writer. [. . .] I decided to write a piece that in form referenced some of my favorite literary fiction, told in footnotes that inject emotion into an otherwise dry piece” (399).

Yet, in the workshop, that brand of genre skepticism has the potential to destroy a young writer’s resolve and their craft. In Elements of Fiction (2019), mystery novelist Walter Mosley takes a quick time-out to pan this aspect of workshop programs. Mosley acknowledges the intent of the pedagogical method and credits the literary community as a genuine merit of the system—specifically, the “other writers at pretty much the same level” as you, and the “people who care about writing and might know ways for you to hone your skills” (108). A good workshop program can be a launchpad, Mosley argues, but it shouldn’t tether us to a scaffold of expectations. He cautions the young writer:

But remember: the university doesn’t own you or your professor’s writing; it doesn’t own Shakespeare either. You should never pay more than the experience is worth. And you aren’t becoming a writer so that you might one day be a teacher.

What people, institutions, and economic systems expect should not define you. Break it down. Figure out what is best, not for you but for your writing. [. . .] Eschew expectations. Do what you have to do to survive, all the while knowing that if the soul of desire does not survive, the body loses meaning. (108)

Mosley’s Elements centers the young writer, urges them to make their writing—and no other force—the central demand on their creativity, their focus, and their craft. This is evident in Mosley’s discussion of plot as “the structure of revelations”—a phrasing that shifts the craft talk from so-called rules of form to how the writer and the story intend to share discoveries with their readers. What if we reimagine the space of the workshop as a student-centered, student-driven structure of revelations, a counter-ritual to the rhetoric and proceedings of the workshop as we’ve known it?

Doing so takes a bit more than “flipping the question,” as Percy puts it. We’ve got to lower the entire scaffolding, drill out the screws, spin off the flanges and uncross the struts, pile up all the steel and plyboard panels and connectors, and imagine new configurations. In a class I teach at the University of North Dakota, called “The Art of Writing: Fiction” in the official academic catalogue, I endeavor to do just that. And the re-assembly instructions aren’t all that convoluted. The steps? Select texts from a mix of genres. Adopt a pedagogy that centers the writer’s intents early in the writing process. Focus on authorial strategies and choices rather than rules. And invite writers to pry open the husks of craft orthodoxies to salvage what fits their purposes—and reject that which doesn’t.

This may seem mechanical, this process of stripping narratives down so that we can see the rules and techniques by which they operate. But what are enchantments, if not meticulously orchestrated systems of language? How can we learn to cast our own spells on readers, unless we study how the elements of a composition harmonize—or clash—with one another?

For a strategy-oriented pedagogy to succeed, workshop leaders ought to teach texts in conversation with one another, rather than direct students to a catechism of pithy craft rules. In a recent section of the aforementioned course, “The Art of Writing: Fiction,” I opted to meet the students’ interest in long-form fiction by offering a workshop on the novella. The first few weeks of the semester provided a framework for debating what a novella is, how it functions, and what we might learn from wildly different examples. The initial craft readings generated a space in which students could develop their own informed perspectives on the form, by pitting Ian McEwan against Lindsey Drager. Students read McEwan’s New Yorker essay “Some Notes on the Novella,” in which McEwan anachronistically situates the novella as “the novel’s daughter” while contending that its blend of brevity and expository depth renders it “the most perfect form of prose fiction.” Afterwards, we turned toward Drager’s response to McEwan, the fragmented essay “The Novella Is Not the Novel’s Daughter” in Michigan Quarterly Review: Drager concurs with McEwan on the form’s use of compression, but she cites taxonomies, impressions, and unique compositional effects that situate the novella as distinct from the tale, the short story, and the novel.

While McEwan and Drager’s essays model spirited debate and creative dialogue, the first novellas on our reading list provided students with material examples of craft as a set of strategies. The students admitted, at first, that they expected to find our first novellas dated; the selections were James Joyce’s “The Dead” and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. (Later in the semester, we read works by Toni Morrison, Dorthe Nors, Haruki Murakami, Nnedi Okorafor, Mara Rutherford, Stephen Graham Jones, and others—a wide variety of realism, historical fiction, experimental fiction, YA lit, sci fi, and horror, to name but a few genres.) In discussing the novellas’ structures, their casts of characters, and their respective points of view, the students discovered that the Christmas party of Joyce’s “The Dead” shares a startling similarity with the rapt gathering of society men in the rooms of Wells’ Time Traveler. In short, both novellas are effectively one-room dramas, with the narratives’ emotional currents surging deep beneath the surface. For Joyce, that sublimated tension is in Gabriel Conroy’s efforts to avoid confronting the mortality of his elderly aunts, the independence-minded Molly Ivors, the realization that his wife Gretta had a childhood love in the sickly boy Michael Furey, and the private histories carried into the party by its attendees. Wells stages his own confluence of underground rivers—the disbelief of the professional men in the Time Traveler’s chambers against the Traveler’s discovery of the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701 AD. In comparing these novellas, students debated genre selection (realism and science fiction) as authorial strategies, along with the similar ways in which Joyce and Wells used their secondary characters, their settings, and the limited awareness of their primary characters.

Regardless, the texts are not set on an altar, like that syllabus steepled on my own fiction professor’s fingertips so many years ago. Students can—and should—critique them, consider what strategies they find effective and why those strategies succeed. It’s an intentional violation of a workshop creed, carried over from the Iowa methodology. (That talismanic treatment of the text is implicit in Frank Conroy’s remark that, “when the soul is truly on the page the work has risen past the level at which it makes much sense for us to talk about it.” After that metempsychosis from soul to page, Conroy contends, “Victory has been achieved and the work passes over to the attention of students of literature, culture, and aesthetics” (83)—a depressing fate, sentencing a story to the afterlife reserved for letters between theologians.) Those Iowa-modeled workshop instructors will need to brace themselves for a seismic perspectival shift in order to open up these assigned texts to student-driven inquiry. An approach like the one espoused in Antonya Nelson’s essay “Short Story: A Process of Revision” will simply reinforce the instructor’s will as the blueprint for crafting a narrative. There, Nelson selects a few stories as templates for must-have features in a work of fiction—a binary-based conflict á la Flannery O’Connor, a Freytag’s Pyramid-compliant plot. Elsewhere, in an essay on the silent workshop method, Nelson makes this move explicit: “The class is not going to challenge the art of Flannery O’Connor or James Baldwin; the sacred texts are separate from the manuscripts of the student apprentice. One is writ in stone; the other is beautifully malleable” (90). This elevation of the text to holy object only provides strictures, obligations. Faced with such monuments, how could the young writer feel anything but the stone-heavy burden of their instructor’s commandments?

Some workshop leaders will think that I’m suggesting we smash the monuments. Instead, I’d argue that resisting the “sacral object” impulse of Conroy or Nelson invites the writer to be an active and engaged reader. Moreover, it extends to the writer a token of trust: an acknowledgment that their impressions of craft can pilot them toward their own theory of storytelling. Trusting the writer to learn and to know their own perceptions of writing is a crucial (and quiet) act of the workshop teacher. It opens the space for the workshop to become, to use that phrase of Mosley’s in a different context, a “structure of revelations.”

So far, I’ve discussed how we might establish craft as a discussion (or debate) between practicing writers over methods and outcomes. And it does so by imagining all of these writers, of all genres, inhabiting the same space—whether you want that to be a Henry James-style house of fiction or an E.M. Forster-style British museum reading room. Genre, elements of form, and techniques aren’t hard and fast rules, but options. After all, the so-called experts can’t agree. Flannery O’Connor centers character at the heart of story: “A story is a complete dramatic action—and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters [. . .]. A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality” (90). Charles Baxter contends that characters in fiction are “creatures of impulse,” driven by their immediate, short-term wants (54). But Andre Dubus—while agreeing with Baxter and O’Connor—would argue that knowing a character’s short-term motives isn’t sufficient: Dubus advocates in his essay “The Habit of Writing” for a “vertical” approach to drafting, in which the writer comes to know all the mysteries, oddities, and convictions of their primary characters. Then there are the writers who rankle at the very concept of motive and its subsequent turn towards inter-personal conflicts. Aimee Bender has argued that “motive” can obstruct writers who draft in order to discover; of her own process, she notes that not knowing what the characters are after permits her “to be very concrete in [her] exploration of it” (55). And Ursula K. Le Guin calls discussions of “conflict” in craft a “reductionism [that] reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options” (123). If that’s the case, then the writer must elect what best fits their vision; the writer must—to vex and frustrate any Libras who might be reading—make choices.

Yet, it’s important to keep in mind that contradictory craft “rules,” like the ones I’ve mentioned above, will hold the workshop in their thrall, unless we check their influence. The comparative readings and the emphasis on choice prepare young writers, I hope, for another challenging task: using the so-called masters of craft against themselves. Authorized to read narratives as series of choices made by a writer, and invited to think of their own creative work in the same light, they can direct that insight to a critical close reading—an explication, if you prefer to be fancy—of such influential craft books as John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (1983). In this book, Gardner advances his notion of the “fictional dream”: “If we carefully inspect our experience as we read,” Gardner writes, “we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind” (30). In the workshop, Gardner’s fictional dream functions as a template for the bleak, spare, Carver-esque realism that sentenced Russell’s early stories to a life of sensible pumps and Benjamin Percy to the dragon-free zone. To the young writer, the fictional dream’s reliance on significant detail—to the banal details of so-called “real people and real lives”—makes the reader something of a ghost, an intangible presence who can trace and traipse through these scenes. The rule seems inviolable. It’s not about us writers, the fictional dream implies; it’s about the story.

But Gardner’s entire methodology is up for debate—and under pressure, it self-deconstructs. In a 1978 debate at the University of Cincinnati, William Gass deftly dismantled the “continuous fictional dream” for being out of touch not only with the preoccupations that readers bring to texts, but for ignoring the physical reality of being a distracted (and distractable) human being engaging with narratives in the presence of so many other stimuli (see Gass and Gardner 175). And we can see those fissures, those deflections of writers’ and reader’s experiences, even in Gardner’s craft writing. A PhD-wielding medievalist and the author of Grendel (1971), a short and formally playful novel that reimagines Beowulf from the yearning perspective of the eponymous monster, Gardner’s own prose undercuts his conservative rules, the strict attention to details, and the regulated causality-based plot demanded in The Art of Fiction. If we hold the passages of Gardner’s book to the light, we can see that the fabric there is somewhat threadbare, somewhat permeable. Consider the follow passage, where Gardner seems to be cudgeling the young writer of genre work with a dictum:

The fabulist—the writer of non-realistic yarns, tales, or fables—may seem at first glance to be doing something quite different; but he is not. Dragons, like bankers and candy-store owners, must have firm characters. A talking tree, a talking refrigerator, a talking clock must speak in a way we learn to recognize, must influence events. (21, emphasis added)

The Art of Fiction revels in this sleight of hand by doling out edicts, stressed with a stray phrase that signals a space for authorial intent. I could as easily have pointed to Gardner’s intense struggle to make sense of the “lyrical novel” and his ham-fisted effort to box Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce’s prose into that old shipping crate of a motive-driven plot (185). Writing about the fabulist, though, Gardner is attempting to assert that craft is craft is craft, whether you’re writing a dinner party, a high-fantasy epic, a potboiler crime story, or a ghost story. Yet, the phrase I’ve emphasized—“in a way we learn to recognize”—surrenders the cause. If the reader must learn to recognize the speech patterns of, say, Grendel’s internal monologue twining with the fire dragon’s rantings in the latter passages of Gardner’s own novel, then there must be a space for the author to make choices that contravene—or downright subvert—the so-called rules.

This is where Matthew Salesses’ major warning in Craft in the Real World applies: if a workshop’s moderator isn’t self-reflective, this critical reading approach can depose the rules only to instate the professor’s preferences as guidelines. Let’s contextualize this. Suppose that we’ve deconstructed Gardner’s maxim on fabulism and fantasy, and we’ve asked our students to read two stories—say, Amanda Leduc’s excellent short story “Wild Life” from StoryQuarterly 49 (2015) and Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Such a conversation might gravitate towards how each story teaches the reader to recognize and interpret the elements of the fantastic in these stories, perhaps by comparing the opening passages of each story:

García Márquez: On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. [. . .] when Pelayo was coming back to the house from throwing crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, [. . .] who [. . .] couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings. (457)

 

Leduc: At night, the hyenas in the apartment above her have sex so loudly that Lizzie has trouble falling asleep.

“They have the top two apartments,” the landlord had said. “Nice people.”

“The hyenas,” Lizzie repeated. “Like—Mr. and Mrs. Hyena?”

The landlord frowned. “I suppose that’s what they call themselves, yes.”

“Are they a problem?” she said. “Should I be worried?”

“Oh no.” The landlord, Bob, had been careful with her. So polite as to be almost unreal. “They’re exemplary. Pay the rent on time. Terribly polite. I’m just telling you, so you’re aware.” (129)

On the surface, Leduc and García Márquez seem to adopt similar strategies for fabricating magical realities on the page. “Very Old Man” and “Wild Life” begin with an innocuous act that tumbles the character toward an inciting encounter with the fantastic. Pelayo has been killing crabs and tossing them out, which leads him to stumble into the man. Lizzie is renting a new apartment, and her upstairs neighbors happen to be hyenas. Although there’s a difference in scale between Pelayo (mis)managing a biblical plague of crabs and Lizzie signing a lease, the actions seem grounded in reality. Each event normalizes the fantastical encounter, renders it part of fabulism’s anchor in the real.

The opening gambit of these stories leads to that danger of substituting one set of rules for the instructor’s own notions. Too often, this comparison would lead to a “rule” for writing any kind of genre fiction. “Introduce the unbelievable in the first paragraph, so the reader knows what’s going on,” we might say. But this isn’t the only pattern that genre fiction follows: indeed, as Maggie Ann Bowers has pointed out, many works of magic realism delay the encounter with the fantastic, or use uncanny events as a jarring fulcrum point in the story. And imposing this rule on Leduc and García Márquez actually prompts misreadings of each story’s complexities. García Márquez establishes competing orthodoxies in “Very Old Man”: the crabs are a manageable plague but the old man is a vexing plight on Pelayo and his wife Elisenda’s land, an actual “nightmare” who’s “dressed like a ragpicker,” and this anticipates the public’s willingness to believe a spider-woman hybrid in a carnival while doubting whether the old man is an angel or a hoax.

Similarly, Leduc’s story also saves a magical transformation for a key moment in the story—adding surprising, yet evocative, possibilities to the magic of her bipedal, talking hyenas. And Leduc’s story imposes stricter divides on the magical elements than García Márquez does. As opposed to “Very Old Man” hosting a melee of competing plagues and carnivalesque events, Leduc instead keeps Lizzie’s human life as a hospital employee sharply separated from (and devoid of) the hyenas who live in her building. Lizzie’s apartment is a liminal space where she can hear the hyenas and imagine their lives and research their species; the apartment building and the hyenas’ apartment is the only space in which she can physically see them and interact with them.

So, two vastly different stories, with only superficial likenesses in their opening ploys. What a workshop conversation might do, instead, is identify this as one strategy amongst many. Then, in a pivot helpful to writers of any genre, the class discussion could pry open that comparison of the two stories and read for the sub-strategies, the sentence- and paragraph-level choices that piece it together. García Márquez uses a slow, painterly scene with a remote third-person narrator. The event of the child’s sickness has caused such an anxiety that the crabs aren’t explained away, but transmuted to a reason for the fever. The angel doesn’t fit so easily. Leduc resorts to dialogue, tamping down Lizzie’s uncertainty and fears through the landlord Bob’s measured calm. And the third-person point of view here hews closely to Lizzie, eschewing the broad pan-outs of García Márquez.

So, in the workshop, disenchanting the literary isn’t just a matter of “flipping the script,” as Percy said. It takes counterbalancing—evening the scales by presenting genre and realism alike as equals. It requires the will to snap the rules-based pedagogy that many workshop teachers received in their own student days. And it’s best done if it empowers the young writer to think of their actions on the page as choices and strategies that they can hazard—and, yes, even reject.

“You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever,” George Saunders notes in “A Mini-Manifesto,” in MFA vs. NYC. “You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’ve made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and [. . .] return to that sacred land where your writing is private” (35).

But when you first set foot in a workshop, you don’t know that promised land awaits you. You may even be led astray from it, to the wastelands of a Cormac McCarthy novel or the middlebrow suburbs of a Jeffrey Eugenides door-stopper, the rucksack on your back packed full of dread and expectations about genre. I speak from experience here: the first story I ever published includes a memento mori of my own genre love. In that story, a child reads a Hardy Boys novel on the sill of a bay window, as his parents’ marriage slowly dissolves over the father’s Kennedy-kindled dream of pursuing a NASA career. I was serving that “bleakest realism” which McEwan questions in Atonement, but I still hoped to pay homage to “the childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens.”

And, admittedly, in killing off all the hobbits and Tolkien knockoffs that populated our high-school-era floppy disks, the edict we received in my first workshop may have purged a few lazy habits. Roughly translated, our marching orders said, “Focus on the elements of fiction—character, point of view, plot, setting, narrative time, structure—and then take on the fantastic.”

But even in that form, the traditional workshop’s genre moratorium will only harm young writers. Let’s not forget the experience that Karen Russell described in the Miami-Dade Public Library, how the literary/genre divide shames students and gives them a false self-image, that they too are bespectacled cartoon dragons undeserving of our attention and respect. That’s why our instructor’s raid on the shire likely purged a few writers from the literary scene, too. They were told their voices and their narrative conventions weren’t welcome. Writers who learned about fictional truth, complex characters, compelling plots, vivid settings, and narrative strategies from a childhood and adolescence bound between the boards of their favorite genre novels—the workshop ought to make space for all those voices.

When we return to the table, to lead our own workshops, let’s agree to this rule, and this rule only: tell us the story that you want to tell, and tell it as only you can.

Works Cited and Consulted

Baxter, Charles. “Against Epiphanies.” Burning down the House: Essays on Fiction, expanded ed., Graywolf, 2008, pp. 41-62.

Bender, Aimee. “Character Motivation.” The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, Tin House Books, 2009, pp. 51-60.

Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. Routledge, 2004.

Carver, Raymond. “On Writing.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Vintage, 1989, pp. 22-27.

Conroy, Frank. “The Writer’s Workshop.” On Writing Short Stories, 2nd ed., edited by Tom Bailey, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 82-90.

Drager, Lindsey. “The Novella Is Not the Novel’s Daughter: An Argument in Notes.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 23 Oct. 2015, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2015/10/the-novella-is-not-the-novels-daughter-an-argument-in-notes-2/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2020.

Dubus, Andre. “The Habit of Writing.” On Writing Short Stories, 2nd ed., edited by Tom Bailey, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 105-111.

Gailey, Sarah. “[STET].” The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019, edited by Carmen Maria Machado, Houghton Mifflin, 2019, pp. 265-270, 399.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Knopf, 1983.

Gass, William H, and John Gardner. “William Gass and John Gardner: A Debate on Fiction.” Interview by Thomas LeClair. Conversations with John Gardner, edited by Allan Chavkin, UP of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 172-182.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners, centennial edition, foreword by Colum McCann, Penguin, 2014, pp. 151-194.

Leduc, Amanda. “Wild Life.” StoryQuarterly, no. 45, 2015, pp. 129-142.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of the Story. Mariner, 2015.

Márquez, Gabriel García. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, edited by David Young and Keith Hollaman, Longman, 1984, pp. 457-462.

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. Nan A. Talese, 2002.

———. “Some Notes on the Novella.” The New Yorker, 29 Oct. 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/some-notes-on-the-novella. Accessed 18 Feb. 2020.

Mosley, Walter. Elements of Fiction. Grove Atlantic, 2019.

Nelson, Antonya. “Short Story: A Process of Revision.” The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, Tin House, 2012, pp. 141-156.

———. “Whose Story Is It? The Anonymous Workshop.” On Writing Short Stories, 2nd ed., edited by Tom Bailey, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 91-94.

O’Connor, Flannery. “Writing Short Stories.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970, pp. 87-106.

Percy, Benjamin. Thrill Me: Essays on Craft. Graywolf, 2016.

Russell, Karen. “Engineering Impossible Architectures.” The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, Tin House, 2012, pp. 197-216.

Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. Catapult, 2021.

———. “Hybrid Interview: Matthew Salesses.” Interview by Candace Eros Diaz. CRAFT Literary, 19 Jan. 2021, https://www.craftliterary.com/2021/01/19/hybrid-interview-matthew-salesses/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2021.

Saunders, George. “A Mini-Manifesto.” MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach, n+1 and Faber and Faber, 2014, pp. 31-40.

Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. Introduction by Marina Warner, Penguin, 2005.