Beyond Craft

Steve Westbrook is an associate professor of English at California State University Fullerton, where he teaches coursesin creative writing, composition-rhetoric, and cultural studies. His edited collection, Composition & Copyright, is availablefrom SUNY-Press, and his poetry chapbook, Vox Americana, is available from Orange Monkey.James Ryan is a PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teachescomposition and interactive fiction. James is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Creative Writing Studies. His narrativeadventure game Roll Player: Adventures is forthcoming from Thunderworks Games.

• AcknowledgmentsAn Introduction: By Way of Boxes and Paradoxes (and Too Many Lines About Felines) Section 1: Where Creative Writing Comes FromChapter 1: Art for Art’s Sake & Craft for Craft’s Sake: Our Love-Hate Relationship with the Academic History of Creative WritingChapter 2: Smoked Dispersed in the Ether: Authors’ Creation Myths and the Problem with Genius Chapter 3: Repurposing Spontaneity: From Inspiration to Invention Section 2: Who Creative Writers Are (in Relation to Others)Chapter 4: Beyond A Room of One’s Own: Toward Collaborative Understandings of Authorship Chapter 5: Making Collaboration Explicit: Co-Creating With Actual Others Section 3: Where Writers Find Their Audiences, or How Publishing WorksChapter 6: What Your Creative Writing Teacher May Not Have Told You: On The Problem of “Greatness” in the Literary Marketplace Chapter 7: Commercial Publishing: Cumulative Advantage and Marketing Magic Chapter 8: Small Literary Publishing: Understanding the Pitfalls of Prestige at Independent and University Presses 193Chapter 9: Self-Publishing in the Internet Age, or the eBook that (Nearly) Ate the World Section 4: What the Future of Creative Writing Might Look LikeChapter 10: Misbehaving On and Off of the Page: Toward the Literature of Tomorrow Works Cited

Beyond Craft is a carefully researched book capable of terrifying and inspiring writers all at once. Sometimes it is hard not to feel overwhelmed when presented with so many reasons to give up the practice; however, such brutally honest research not only contributes to dismantle unhelpful myths but also empowers writers to actively look for ways to change what is currently not working. For example, now that we understand how the image of the writer has been manipulated to promote harmful concepts like literary greatness and genius, we can get rid of such an awkward burden, and, as this handbook suggests, make room to new ideas reinventing what it means to be a creative writer in the 21st century.