I woke up thinking about writing, and I want to explore those thoughts on “paper,” even knowing that I’ve got a nasty cold and it and the various medications I’m taking for it may make these musings even more disjointed than they would’ve been otherwise.
Writing is both an art and a craft; craft can be taught, but I’m not sure art can.
What do I mean by “craft” and “art,” anyway?
At their most basic, it seems to me that craft is what allows the writer to convey a story so that the readers of the story understand it.
Art, by contrast and again in my opinion, is the writer conveying a story in such a way that the readers are impacted by it after they finish reading it.
Craft is, therefore, mostly generally accepted principles and rules of grammar and language – using the right words (conscience vs. conscious
, rogue vs. rouge, their vs. there) in the “right” order, where the right order is the one that conveys what the writer meant as opposed to what the writer actually wrote.
Okay, that sounds confusing, but one example has stood out in my mind the last few days, from a Eureka fanfic, and I’m going to use it here, devoid of context and not identifying the author or the work, just to make my point. I would use an example from one of my own stories – because G*d knows, I do this a lot. I usually fix them on re-read, and more than that, most of my stories are semi-forgotten as soon as they’re posted, so I have no examples from my own work to use at the moment.
Anyway, in the story, Zoe says, “People are pretty protective of my dad in Eureka.”
The way I read it – thanks to never quite forgetting how to diagram sentences – in Eureka modifies my dad. Therefore, what the sentence conveys to me is, “(all) people (everywhere) are pretty protective of my dad (when or while he is) in Eureka.”
That may be what the writer meant, granted, but it seems fairly unlikely. I think the writer meant for in Eureka to modify people (or, at least, that’s what I would’ve written if it had been my story) – so writing, “people in Eureka are pretty protective of my dad” would’ve conveyed that meaning more clearly without any confusion on the reader’s part.
Yes, I recognize that craft is partly a matter of taste as well; that said, the principles of good grammar generally haven’t changed much over the years, so following them is automatically craft. Breaking them can be art.
Now that long example is out of the way, I do want to emphasize that craft isn’t the be-all and end-all of writing. A perfectly crafted (whatever that actually means, anyway) story is not guaranteed to be art. The opposite is more likely to be true: art is rough and raw and almost never “perfect.”
If you watch The Voice (specifically the US edition, though I’m sure this is true for the other editions, too), you’ll have heard the coaches saying that a performance was “technically executed” or “technically perfect” – and maybe too perfect. The coaches often advise contestants to be a little raw, and let the emotion of the song come through. That is craft vs. art in a nutshell.
What this translates to in writing is: beyond following the principles of good grammar enough so that the readers understand what you’re saying
, don’t worry overly much about following all the other “rules” of writing that people spout.
Some of the stories that are likely to be classics don’t obsess over writing “rules.” Instead, they move much further along the spectrum (and I think art vs. craft may actually be a continuous spectrum, but I need either more or fewer drugs to follow that thought) to a point where their stories, their art, shines through, even transcends those silly “rules.”
You want examples? Got one close to hand: Harry Potter.
Back when I was a member of an online writer’s chat group, the members (myself included more often than I like to admit) had some great times dissecting everything that was wrong with the Harry Potter stories. There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, except…
…except when we focused so much on what was wrong with it that we forgot to look at what was right with it. And there’s a lot right with Harry Potter, or else those stories wouldn’t still be so popular twenty-odd years later.
The problem comes when a writer sets out to write a story that will be as popular as Harry Potter. That’s a fool’s errand for a lot of reasons.
All we can do is tell our stories (or allow stories to be told through us, however you prefer to look at it) the best we know how – and that best does not mean following any rules beyond the principles of good grammar, and even those only so that our meaning is clear to the majority of readers.
Then, if the writer is prolific and/or lucky enough, one of thon’s stories might reach the level of art for those readers.
