In the world of creative writing, a new voice is causing a stir by tearing up the rulebook. Elizabeth McCracken, the acclaimed novelist and former tutor at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, has launched a provocative salvo against the conventional wisdom of craft manuals with her new book, A Long Game: How to Write Fiction.
A Rebellious Start
McCracken makes her intentions clear from the very first line. "Nobody knows how to write a book," she declares, immediately setting herself apart from the genre's typically encouraging tone. She openly admits a distaste for the standard craft book, criticising its often "chipper, cheerleaderish" style, exemplified by works like Walter Mosley's This Year You Write Your Novel.
Instead of offering a prescriptive list of dos and don'ts, McCracken champions a more rebellious, intuitive approach. For her, writing is not a process of obediently following rules but a form of "sustained mischievous truancy." This perspective, she argues, is what truly great writers have always understood.
Antidotes to Cliched Advice
The book serves as a powerful antidote to the well-worn mantras that haunt writing workshops. McCracken takes direct aim at pillars of advice such as "Show, don't tell" and the infamous "Write what you know." Her counter-arguments are distilled from decades of experience and are designed to liberate writers paralysed by such clichés.
She is particularly scathing about the pressure to "Write every day," offering a more relatable, if darker, motivation: "Me, I harness the power of my own self-loathing." This frank admission cuts to the heart of the often messy, irrational reality of a writer's life, far removed from sanitised workshop ideals.
The Evolution of Writing Culture
McCracken's intervention arrives in a literary landscape where the private language of creative writing programmes has become mainstream. Terms like trope, POV, backstory, and character arc are now used casually, even to analyse public figures and political events. Her book stands as a reaction against this systematisation of storytelling.
While she follows in the footsteps of notable craft books like John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft, and Robert McKee's Story, McCracken's contribution is distinctly contrarian. She positions herself not as a wise elder statesperson, but as the "naughty older sister" of writing guides—perverse, unashamed, and determined to be more interesting than merely correct.
Elizabeth McCracken's A Long Game: How to Write Fiction is published by Jonathan Cape priced at £14.99. It is a bracing, epigrammatic, and deeply personal guide that promises to free writers from the tyranny of rules and reconnect them with the anarchic joy of creation.
