What Is Craft and What Does It Do, Part 2

Part 1 is here

WHAT IS CRAFT AND WHAT DOES IT DO, PART 2

 

12. Craft is admission to a club. But as a friend once told me, within the club there’s always another club.

13. Craft is teachable, but is rarely proficiently taught.

14. Revision is the craft through which a writer is able to say and shape who they are.

15. Craft, like the self, is made by culture and reflects culture, and can develop to resist and reshape culture if it is sufficiently examined and enough work is done to unmake what is there.

16. There are many crafts, as there are many selves, and one way the teaching of craft fails is to teach craft as if it is one.

17. Craft, because it is a signifier whose signified is made up of signifiers, can be used as an epithet, as praise, as silence, as empty talk. Craft is like the phrase “good job,” which means nothing on its own but let’s the speaker feel like something meaningful has been said.

18. “Know your audience” is craft.

19. You can’t talk about craft without talking about audience, because one does not exist without the other. A word spoken to no one, not even the self, has no meaning because it has no purpose. (Unless you are God, perhaps.)

20. Craft in fact aims at audience and audience does/should therefore influence your wielding of and purpose for it.

21. Craft is not separate from ideas.

22. Craft encourages a world view. Craft is both the world of the text and its implied author and reader and the view from within and outside of it.

23. Craft is linked to pleasure. Pleasure is cultural as much as it is biological. Like pleasure, in order to use craft purposefully perhaps you must destroy it.