I’ve been asked to speak about “some aspect of craft.” I dithered over this lecture. I always dither over lectures, never more than when they’re about “craft.” They cause me an anxiety that the request for a piece of fiction never does and never could. Not that I find writing fiction easy—I don’t—but I find it within my remit. When someone asks me to write a story I feel they’re giving me a comprehensible block of stone and my job is to carve out whatever shape I think’s within it. Even if the result is poor and doesn’t work in the space, still it’s the shape I honestly thought was in there. I’m not trying to put anything over on anybody.

But a lecture on craft… at once something fraudulent creeps into the enterprise, there’s a whiff of snake oil. I speak from experience, having written a few “Art of Fiction” polemics and regretted them all. In my opinion one should run, not walk, from any essay entitled “The Art of Fiction” that is not about the art of a particular piece of fiction, or -several. I don’t believe in craft in the abstract—each individual novel is its own rule book, training ground, factory, and independent republic. The only time I feel I’m writing honestly about craft—either my own or craft in general—is when I have a specific piece of fiction in my sights, when I’m writing about Middlemarch or Take a Girl Like You or Libra or The Trial; when I, as Humbert Humbert put it, have some actual words to play with.