John Gardner - The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

This is a book designed to teach the serious beginning writer the art of fiction. I assume from the outset that the would-be writer using this book can become a successful writer if he wants to, since most of the people Ive known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers. About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it. If no matter how hard he tries he simply cannot do what he must do, this book will help him understand why he was not sent into the world to be a writer but for some other noble purpose. Books on writing tend to make much of how difficult it is to become a successful writer, but the truth is that, though the ability to write well is partly a giftlike the ability to play basketball well, or to outguess the stock marketwriting ability is mainly a product of good teaching supported by a deep-down love of writing. Though learning to write takes time and a great deal of practice, writing up to the worlds ordinary standards is fairly easy. As a matter of fact, most of the books one finds in drugstores, supermarkets, and even small-town public libraries are not well written at all; a smart chimp with a good creative-writing teacher and a real love of sitting around banging a typewriter could have written books vastly more interesting and elegant. Most grown-up behavior, when you come right down to it, is decidedly second-class. People dont drive their cars as well, or wash their ears as well, or eat as well, or even play the harmonica as well as they would if they had sense. This is not to say people are terrible and should be replaced by machines; people are excellent and admirable creatures; efficiency isnt everything. But for the serious young writer who wants to get published, it is encouraging to know that most of the professional writers out there are push-overs.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writernot for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fithough it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.) What is said here, whatever use it may be to others, is said for the elite; that is, for serious literary artists.

The instruction is presented in two somewhat overlapping parts. In , I deal with specific technical matters and offer writing exercises.

Needless to say, neither section of this book is exhaustive. I have included here everything that, over the years, I have found it necessary to say as a creative-writing teacher. Some things ultimately of great importance I have found it not necessary to say; so they are not in this book. Let me give an example. The skillful writer may play games with narrative styles and points of view. He may, for instance, use the tone of the old German tale-teller (At the turn of the century, in the province of D, there lived ), and he may use that tone, which suggests great authority, in a story where in the end we discover the narrator to be unreliable. For the writer who has thoroughly digested the principles offered in this book, it should be unnecessary to call attention to what the weirdly ironic use of tone and style must do to the narrative. Seize the trunk of any science securely, and you have control of its branches.

I may as well add that I do not give much emphasis here to the various forms of unconventional fiction now popular in universities. Since metafiction is by nature a fiction-like critique of conventional fiction, and since so-called deconstructive fiction (think of Robert Coovers story Noahs Brother) uses conventional methods, it seems to me more important that young writers understand conventional fiction in all its complexity than that they be too much distracted from the fundamental.

This book and the exercises at the end of it have been used for many years in the various universities where Ive taught creative writing, most recently SUNY-Binghamton, and at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and at universities where friends of mine have taught creative writing. In its underground designation as The Black Book, it has had a wide circulation among writers and teachers, most of them not people I know, friends of friends. Ive gotten periodic comments on the books effectiveness, and at the advice of others who have used it Ive revised both the main text and the exercises again and again. I do not publish it now because it seems to me to have at last reached perfectionfor all I know, all the changes may have made it a hymn to confusionbut because Im convinced that in its present stage its good enough and, so far as Im aware, the most helpful book of its kind.

In some earlier versions, I had an opening section on how creative writing ought to be taughtthe proper use of in- and out-of-class exercises, how much should be required of students, what the proper tone of a workshop should be, and so forth. I thought the discussion important because of the widespread mistaken notion that creative writing cannot really be taught, an opinion often expressed even by creative-writing teachers. In the end Ive dropped that section since it lies outside the domain of this book, which is simply how to write fiction. Anyone interested in hearing my opinions on matters more tangential, from how one should conduct a writers workshop to whether one should write with a pencil, a pen, or a typewriter, can find them in another book of mine (answers to questions most commonly asked after readings or lectures), On Becoming a Novelist.

PART I

Notes on Literary-Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic Law and Artistic Mystery

What the beginning writer ordinarily wants is a set of rules on what to do and what not to do in writing fiction. As well see, some general principles can be set down (Things to Think About When Writing Fiction) and some very general warnings can be offered (Things to Watch Out For); but on the whole the search for aesthetic absolutes is a misapplication of the writers energy. When one begins to be persuaded that certain things must never be done in fiction and certain other things must always be done, one has entered the first stage of aesthetic arthritis, the disease that ends up in pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of intuition. Every true work of artand thus every attempt at art (since things meant to be similar must submit to one standard)must be judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws. If it has no laws, or if its laws are incoherent, it failsusuallyon that basis.