Matt Bell Is a Student (and Teacher) of Writing

In this interview, Ruth Joffre talks with Matt Bell about his new craft book ‘Refuse to Be Done,’ interactive storytelling, building a craft library, and more.

Can a craft book about writing also be a pep talk? Matt Bell’s new craft book Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts (Soho Press, 2022) achieves exactly that. In a tone at once instructional, conversational, and comforting, Bell presents writers of all levels with a practical, approachable means of writing a novel from start to finish.

Bell’s book is divided into three main sections, which correspond to the three drafts he proposes a writer undertakes:

1. The first draft (or the exploratory draft), in which the writer focuses on getting a full draft done—and enjoying the process along the way

2. The second draft, in which the writer returns to their first draft after a well-earned break and outlines what they’ve already written in order to better understand it

3. The third draft, in which the writer polishes, refines, and completes their novel, using a variety of exercises to cut out weak sentences and delete what Bell calls “weasel words”

Along the way, Bell speaks directly to readers, deploying a familiar, understanding voice in the second person to address “you,” the writer, and guide you through challenges and triumphs on the path to a completed novel. Bell draws on his own experiences as a novelist to tell readers, in effect, “I’ve been where you are. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. You got this.” The result is a craft book that doubles as a friendly voice in moments of doubt and despair.

In this interview, I talk with Matt Bell about why it was important to him to write this kind of craft book, his own relationship with craft, and how being a teacher informed his understanding of craft.

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Ruth Joffre: In the introduction to Refuse to Be Done, you note that your approach to the three drafts in the book evolved over time, through your own experience. I’m curious: What were you taught about revision when you were starting out, and how did you learn/unlearn/relearn that advice?

Matt Bell: I wish there’d been more to unlearn! I have an undergraduate English degree with an emphasis in creative writing and an MFA in fiction, and in almost every workshop I was ever in, there was a requirement to turn in a revision at the end of the semester. The idea, I suppose, was to take what advice we heard in workshop and use it to make a new draft, which seems straightforward but usually isn’t. Take which advice? From whom? And do what with it? I was always able to find my way forward with stories, given enough time and enough effort, but that didn’t seem workable with novels. From the first: The manuscript was too long, the problems were too legion. (Also, good luck finding fifteen people who’ll agree to read your novel and sit around a conference table to discuss it with you, after you’re out of school . . . ) I wanted practical, actionable things to do—and eventually that led me to the material of this book.

RJ: Like many authors of craft books, you chose to write your guide in the second person and speak to a “you” intended to refer to the reader, also a writer. Your tone is conversational, approachable, at times even motivational. When writing the book, did you start writing in the second person? What reading experience do you hope to foster with this approach?

MB: I wonder if somewhere in that decision to write in the third person is part of the difference between a craft book and a book of literary criticism. It seemed like the obvious default to me, but I think that’s probably because I’m a teacher: Most of what I do in the classroom is talking directly to other writers, trying my best to help them write the stories they want to write. I hope the experience of the book is something similar to what I try to create in the classroom: a personal connection, rooted in the work, between one writer and another.

RJ: In reading Refuse to Be Done, it becomes abundantly clear that you have been studying craft books, reading author interviews, and collecting quotes about writing for a long time. When did you start this collection of craft-related materials, and what initially inspired you to do so?

MB: I’m a student of writing, too, and will be as long as I’m a writer. I’ve got a whole bookshelf in my home office that’s nothing but craft books and literary criticism and another matching one in my campus office. I also keep two commonplace books, one for great sentences and paragraphs that I find in books I’m reading and one for ideas about writing that I find useful or intriguing. I think I’ve been keeping both of them since grad school, in one form or another, and with varying degrees of intensity: Sometimes months go by without my adding something; sometimes it seems like I’m adding to the pile every day. I really can’t recommend that practice enough, to anyone looking to build up their own personal canon of ideas and examples.

RJ: What single piece of writing advice has been most helpful for you and why?

MB: This is such a hard question to answer! But maybe the thing I think about most isn’t really a direct piece of advice but a suggestion of a mindset that I try my best to emulate: Jane Smiley once said, “I believe that you either love the work or the rewards. Life is a lot easier if you love the work.” I’ve always done my best to love the work, as exclusively as I can.

RJ: Many of the exercises in the book emerged in one way or another from lessons you have devised for your creative writing students. In translating those lessons from in-person and virtual courses to a craft book, did the format and content change? If so, how and why?

MB: Some of the material here is probably pretty similar, but it is probably a little more generalized too, especially in its approach to the audience. A couple years ago, I read Jesse Ball’s Notes on My Dunce Cap, and he says something rather offhand in there about the importance of making materials specifically for the students you’re teaching. When I write exercises or lecture notes for class, I obviously draw on what I’ve done before, but I tend to write the materials from scratch, adjusting them toward what I know about the students in my particular class. (I’m lucky to have a reasonable-enough teaching assignment to make this possible.) Obviously, that isn’t possible for the book version, so the audience here is more imagined: I’ve never really thought about it before, but I’m probably writing for an imagined version of myself at the time I set out to write my first novel. What would I have wanted to know? What would’ve been most useful?

RJ: Craft books and the teaching of craft in general have a tendency to be proscriptive, but in Refuse to Be Done you make a point of saying that the book can be modular, and readers are free to approach the three phases of the novel and the exercises you provide for them out of order. Why was it important to you to do this?

MB: I think writing teachers in general are less proscriptive than they used to be—at least my friends and colleagues are—but I also know that I’m a fairly idiosyncratic writer. I don’t think most writers should write exactly the way I do, and so the goal of teaching is never to impart my exact aesthetics or processes to others but to offer options in the hopes of helping them discover their own. When you spend a lot of time with particular students, they sometimes start saying your own ideas about craft back to you, which means they’ve internalized them, and that can be a nice compliment. But even better is when they tell you about this idea they’ve moved on from, forgetting that it was you that gave it to them, going on toward some more personalized version of the idea that’s more useful to them. That’s the ideal.

RJ: While reading, I was struck by the fact that, of the three drafts, the second gets the least attention in terms of pages (only sixteen) and yet could take just as long or longer than the first and third draft, due to the time needed to gain perspective on the manuscript. Can you talk about the choice to keep this chapter short and what you hope readers take away from it?

MB: Yes! For me, the second draft takes more or less the same amount of time as the first, despite how it might appear in the book. One reason for that is simply that almost everything that’s in the first-draft chapter also applies to the second draft: You’re writing the novel all over again, with more guidance from an outline and with a better knowledge of what book it is you’re writing, but a lot of the same techniques can be reapplied.

RJ: You have written a wide variety of books, including novels, story collections, and a book about the video game Baldur’s Gate II. When did you start exploring the idea of writing a craft book, and what inspired you to do so?

MB: The earliest version of Refuse to Be Done was an hour-long craft talk given in my own classes and at literary conferences and low-res residencies and so on. It evolved in that form for a few years, until one day I gave it at the University of Alabama. Afterward, Heidi Lynn Staples suggested that it could/should be a book, and I thought, Maybe I’ll try! I’m very grateful for that push.

RJ: Aside from Baldur’s Gate II, what pieces of art or pop culture outside the literary sphere have taught you the most about craft and why?

MB: I think a lot about cinematic transitions, which can suggest ways to move from scene to scene with efficiency and surprise. I’ve also been an avid video gamer my entire life, and I know I’ve been influenced by the way stories are told in games. In general, I think interactive storytelling mediums like Choose Your Own Adventure books, D&D, and computer games did as much to shape me as a writer as anything else. Those were my first hints that stories were malleable, that the reader/viewer/player was a participant in the process of bringing a story to life.

RJ: What other craft books and resources would you recommend to those who pick up your book?

MB: I love The Writer’s Notebook volumes from Tin House and the Art Of series from Graywolf. I refer constantly to Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Samuel Delany’s About Writing and Charles Johnson’s The Way of the Writer. Robert McKee’s Story. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. The Half-Known World by Robert Boswell. Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook. Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Paisley Rekdal’s Appropriate. And really that’s only the tip of the iceberg, right off the top of my head. There’s so much out there, and surely so much I haven’t discovered yet. I’m grateful for everyone who writes clearly and generously about craft. I know I’m not even close to having learned all I want to learn.