Works considered the best examples of a profession tend to show a high degree of craftsmanship. Writing isn’t an exception. Webster’s Dictionary defines craftsmanship as simply dexterity in a trade or handicraft. Dictionaries will often say a dog is a carnivorous four legged animal belonging to the Canidae family. However, anyone who owns a dog knows a dog is much more than that. So what is craftsmanship? To my experience craftsmanship is a combination of specificity, passion, practice.
Master craftsmen practice their discipline, whether it is music, carpentry, or writing. What I’ve learned is practice makes it yours. Practice doesn’t always make perfect, but it does make better. Through practice a unique voice, or a unique way of doing things, and results, emerges. What happens is you first learn the rules and by doing so you develop ways for twisting, bending, breaking, and creating new rules. For instance, the poet Reginald Shepherd was an African American kid raised in the Bronx, but he learned mythology and the classics and has taken what he learned, combined it with his experience and now writes some of the best poetry out there, with themes, such as Orpheus in the Bronx, that are new and creative.
Reginald Shepherd was able to take his passion for poetry and integrate his unique voice—images, language-- into the Western Canon’s poetry tradition, a tradition which never had a black kid growing up in tenements in the 20thC Bronx in mind. My experience with passion shows that it’s not just a strong orientation toward, it is a yearning for; sometimes so much so that we live for it. Our love for our discipline comes out in our craft, our results, and our attitude toward practice.
Skill is obviously related to practice and passion. Through practice and passion we learn the rules, create new ones, and become exacting of your use of detail and accuracy. Skill creates the specificity--that cursed term writers are always hearing about. Specificity, attention to detail, accuracy of description, of events, is essential to good craftsmanship. We’re always told to write about what we know about. Some people are now saying that’s not necessary because we can research what we don’t know about. Well, I’ve found I often have to research even the things I do know about. I really don’t believe I can write anymore than a grammatically accurate, but clinical book about a world I haven’t inhabited, at least in my imagination. That’s part of what makes writing exhausting: You have to live your tale, at least while writing it.
So, to me, craftsmanship is specificity created by practice and driven by passion.
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