Every book is a book on craft by Eric Beetner

Do you have favorite craft sessions, or articles/books on craft that you return to for inspiration or help?

This week’s topic is tricky for me because the simple answer would be to write No and then end it there. 

I’m certainly not going to say I am self-taught. I have taken English classes in school, screenwriting classes in college. Never a novel writing class, nor have I bought any guide books or craft books beyond Strunk and White and I still have to refer to it when I come across Farther and Further. 

I can’t say I’m self taught because I learned and continue to learn a great deal by reading. And I should expand on that because I think there is much to be learned by novelists about storytelling structure and style from films, plays, and TV as well. 

Let’s open it up even further (farther?) I have long felt that there is as much if not more to be learned by unsuccessful work than by the brilliant stuff. A bad book or a bad movie can teach volumes IF you can break it down and decipher what doesn’t work for you. There needs to be a sense of what storytelling techniques were ineffective, and how you would improve them.

What is that if not a lesson in craft? 

Self-teaching mostly means taking advantage of the lessons all around us, but doing it outside of a formal classroom or having it written down and presented in a book form or in a seminar. 

Any writer interested in developing their own voice must learn to take in craft from other sources and then learn what to let go, what to absorb into your own style. 

I’ve played guitar since age 15. I took 3 months of lessons from a friend of mine’s brother who was only 3 years older than I was. He taught me basic chords and one blues scale. After that I went off on my own path, spending hours studying and dissecting albums that I loved and learning to play by ear. Through that process I never quite sounded like the records I was trying to emulate, but I learned how to play and how other players I loved did it. I’ve long toyed with the idea of taking formal lessons to learn certain techniques like finger picking or to expand on those blues scales, but I never have because for better or worse, my playing sounds like me. 

There are no shortage of tutorials to teach you how to play like Eddie Van Halen or Stevie Ray Vaughn. But why would I want to sound like someone else? I may not be the most technical player, but everything I’ve done has been 100% mine. I am the sum of my influences which are as varied as Black Flag and Muddy Waters, both of which I played for hours and hours in my bedroom while I learned.

I feel the same about writing. We all have our influences, our inspirations and the writers from whom we borrow either consciously or unconsciously. We absorb craft through the osmosis of consuming stories. We are inspired by great writing to reach for higher peaks, and are inspired by lousy writing to never do it like that.

So I don’t personally refer to books on craft, but instead try to see every book I read as a lesson in craft and it’s up to me what to take from it.