The Long Game Review by Elizabeth McCracken – Here’s How to Really Write Your Novel | Creative writing

TRope, point of view, backstory, character arc. In the thirty years since I was a student of the gentle, pipe-smoking 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 has become a familiar, often sarcastic and self-aware way of interpreting the great and not-so-great novels of our time. “Don’t worry about Liz Truss’s YouTube series – it just has a major character moment.”

The most intense distillation of this system of thought (if you can call it that) has always been the letter book, the writing manual. They are sometimes written by the most successful in the profession (such as Ursula K Le Guin’s Guiding the Craft) or the most successful in advising the profession (the story of Robert Mackey), but more often they are compiled by novelists and screenwriters at the end of their academic careers as teachers of creative writing. The book “The Art of Fantasy” by John Gardner is the grandfather of this subgenre.

With the long game, Elizabeth McCracken He arrived very late to the party. She is determined to spice things up. At first, she disagrees with literal books, both their sentiments and their usual tone: “cheerful, encouraging, generally with an encouraging third-person narrator, intended to make the exhausting process of writing a book seem possible.” She’s clearly thinking of motivational titles like Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.

We know from her big entrance — first sentence, first page — that McCracken, the novelist, memoirist, and former teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is going to spit or spill a few cocktails. “No one knows how to write a book,” she began. “I don’t like literal books. I’ve probably never read one.” She proceeds to explain how she has more than a few thoughts about the comfortable consensus that preceded her. She’s a self-confessed satirist whose catchphrases are eager to underscore it: “Being ashamed to write isn’t interesting, but writing about shame is great.”

In this, it’s not your usual wise old literary hand. Instead, she’s naughty, perverted, and quietly exhibitionistic, and not ashamed of it. She reminds me of the older teenage sister of one of my best friends at school. She lived in a world I didn’t. She acted or misbehaved exactly as she chose; And sometimes I did the wrong thing, the bad thing, because it was more interesting.

McCracken’s point of view is that of the naughty older sister in writing. I agree with her. Writing is not about compiling a list of rules and then sticking to them. If it were, none of the great writers I’ve ever read would be interested in it. Not for half a day. Writing is a form of persistent, harmful truancy. It’s not about being good.

This position would be surprisingly liberating for many rules-haunted writers. If you’ve been poisoned by a hackneyed piece of workshop feedback, such as “Show, don’t tell” or “Write what you know,” McCracken will offer you the antidote. It will be intense, drawn from the experience, and the insemination may cause you pain. But after that, you’ll stop sweating and shivering, and you’ll get on with your life. Here McCracken talks about that hated and hackneyed piece of advice, “Write every day”: “Everyday writers have a clear answer to the question, How will you get your work done? As for me, I tap into the power of my self-loathing.

It’s not your typical creative writing workshop advice, but it’s true to the craziness of this writing life.