A Long Game

Elizabeth McCracken, an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and longtime creative writing teacher, presents a book of advice, reflection, and personal anecdote. Drawing on more than three decades of publishing and teaching, she offers not a systematic manual but an idiosyncratic, loosely structured meditation on how fiction gets written, read, and revised. She opens by declaring that nobody knows how to write a book, and that much of what follows may be "hogwash," since writers giving advice are always, in some sense, talking to themselves.

McCracken distinguishes her book from typical craft guides, which she characterizes as cheerful and encouraging. She does not know whether her reader can write a book and is not sure she can write this one, despite having published four novels, three story collections, and a memoir. She questions what "craft" means for fiction, listing conventional elements such as character, plot, setting, and dialogue, but argues that no single element makes fiction fiction and that the elements cannot be cleanly separated. Three core principles emerge early: ambition, which she defines as the willingness to make mistakes; process, since the most persistent writers are the ones still publishing years later; and strangeness, because fascination with material gives fiction a soul. She advises against following writing advice like a recipe, urging writers to compose a personal manifesto tailored only to their own work.

McCracken recalls rules absorbed at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a prominent graduate creative writing program, between 1988 and 1990, including "Show, don't tell," "Write what you know," and "Kill your darlings." She contends that much writing advice arises from the anxieties of its era and will eventually seem outdated. Despite her grudges, she credits graduate school with providing lasting friendships built on mutual seriousness, which she calls her top advice for young writers: Find the hardest-working writers you can and take one another seriously. She challenges the ubiquitous advice that real writers must write every day, calling it excellent for those it suits but harmful when treated as universal law. Circumstance, temperament, caregiving responsibilities, and illness can all prevent daily writing, and believing one must write every day can cause shame when life intervenes, turning writing into an unpaid bill stuffed in a drawer. Her alternative is to harness self-loathing over stretches of weeks or months, using the dread of wasted time as fuel. She reframes imposter syndrome as fear of failing repackaged as a permanent condition, urging writers to redirect personal flaws into characters rather than letting those feelings stall the work.

Autobiographical threads give the book its texture. McCracken reproduces the first poem she wrote at age five, about owls, and explains she began writing because her brother excelled at drawing and she needed her own way to show off. She describes a 1990 fellowship residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she procrastinated until eight p.m. each night, then wrote for hours fueled by the day's accumulating self-loathing. She traces her career from public librarian to itinerant visiting professor to tenured faculty member, and describes her writing workspace, her grandfather's office chair, and her scattered notebooks. She recalls dressing in garish plaid pants, vintage hats, and silver lamé sneakers in high school, hiding in plain sight as a socially awkward teenager full of shame and arrogance, and identifies this dynamic as exactly why she writes fiction.

A substantial portion of the book addresses narrative choices. McCracken catalogs narrator types, insisting on measureless variety within first, second, and third person and warning against anyone who deems one type superior. She defines all narrators as "agreed-upon magic" and argues that fiction's particular power is the ability to know strangers from inside and outside simultaneously. She warns against excessive "filtering verbs" ("I saw," "I realized") that keep narrators narrating instead of acting, and characterizes third-person narrators as gaseous invertebrates with god-level powers, able to access the thoughts of crowds, children, and animals. On time and tense, she argues that people live in "a great simultaneity" of past, present, and future. Flashbacks fail, she contends, only when they are merely informational, departing from and returning to the same point in the timeline without changing anything.

McCracken uses karaoke as a recurring metaphor for failure. She connects her refusal to sing at a writers' conference to an eighth-grade audition for the musical Oliver!, during which she chose the theme from the television series MASH rather than a song from the show she loved, because she dreaded revealing her longing to the music teachers. The broader lesson: She has written bad fiction whenever she has hidden her passion. Writers must write for love and revenge, she argues, and stop worrying about reader approval.

Material, what a writer chooses to write about, receives sustained attention. McCracken argues that what distinguishes strong writing is the writer's relationship to material, something personally interesting that the writer is puzzled or troubled by, though not necessarily autobiographical. She elevates necessity, the thing a writer must write, as the highest form of interest. On character creation, she describes her imagination as a dinghy that must be unmoored and allowed to drift, and urges writers to attend to characters' physicality, arguing that too many fictional people become all soul and no body. She defines setting as concentric rings radiating outward from the soul through anatomy, clothing, room, and hemisphere. She addresses dialogue as simultaneously character, plot, and structure, and attacks the movement encouraging flamboyant attribution verbs over the unobtrusive "said" as perhaps the worst regularly offered writing advice.

On plot, McCracken distinguishes it from mere event: Event is what happens, but plot is the electricity between events, how they work through characters. She diagrams active plot and emotional plot as two lines whose intersection, where event affects feeling and feeling drives action, is where real plot occurs. She credits playwriting with teaching her the practical side of fiction, since actors and classmates asked concrete questions about staging and consistency, and credits poetry with teaching compression and multidirectional structure.

McCracken admits she always decides on a structure before beginning a novel and is always wrong. She recounts that her most recent novel originally included a running commentary in the form of a fictional writing manual, which she cut almost entirely; this discarded material became the seed of the present book. She ranks punctuation from weakest to strongest and advises cutting explanatory conjunctions to let readers supply connections themselves. She catalogues her own overused words and prose dislikes, acknowledging that language changes.

The book's later sections address publishing and resilience. McCracken recounts her first book's quiet publication after its imprint was shuttered, and describes years of work with a beloved editor who published her second and third books but rejected two subsequent novels. She was never going to quit, she writes, because the only thing that makes her feel better after writing breaks her heart is more writing. She warns against chasing the market instead of writing one's own books, and counsels repurposing jealousy rather than indulging it.

On teaching, McCracken argues that in workshops, only 20 percent of advice received will be directly applicable, but that 20 percent is gold. She warns against revising to answer every objection, because the result will be unobjectionable fiction, the worst kind. She defines perfectionism as a reluctance to fail in public rather than a badge of high standards. She champions humor as oxygen in otherwise airless fiction, insisting that removing all traces of humor while pursuing pure sadness risks losing the reader entirely. The flawed, the oddball, and the broken, she declares, are magnificent.

McCracken introduces the concept of nonfinito, art that is intentionally or circumstantially unfinished, as the necessary condition of any book on writing, because comprehensiveness is impossible and what a writer knows changes year to year. She concedes that she meant everything she wrote in this book and has already changed her mind about some of it. She closes with the assertion that writing is a long game, and that what matters is learning to get work done in whatever way is possible. On the first day of every workshop, she tells her students the writer's universal mantra: "I am a genius with much to learn."