The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

ALSO BY JOHN GARDNER,
AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE BOOKS

The Art of Living and Other Stories
Gilgamesh
Grendel
Jason and Medeia
The Life and Times of Chaucer
Mickelsson’s Ghosts
Nickel Mountain
October Light
The Resurrection
The Sunlight Dialogues

To all my creative-writing students, and
to all my fellow teachers of creative writing

Contents

Preface

PART I
Notes on Literary-Aesthetic Theory

1
Aesthetic Law and Artistic Mystery

2
Basic Skills, Genre, and Fiction as Dream

3
Interest and Truth

4
Metafiction, Deconstruction, and Jazzing Around

PART II
Notes on the Fictional Process

5
Common Errors

6
Technique

7
Plotting

Exercises

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 I’ve 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 gift—like the ability to play basketball well, or to outguess the stock market—writing 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 world’s 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 don’t 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 isn’t 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 writer—not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi—though 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
Part One
, I present a general theory of fiction, a much closer look at what fiction is—what it does, how it works—than is usual in books on craft. Understanding very clearly what fiction “goes for,” how it works as a mode of thought, in short what the art of fiction
is
, is the first step toward writing well. In
Part Two
, 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 Coover’s story “Noah’s 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 I’ve 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. I’ve gotten periodic comments on the book’s effectiveness, and at the advice of others who have used it I’ve 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 perfection—for all I know, all the changes may have made it a hymn to confusion—but because I’m convinced that in its present stage it’s good enough and, so far as I’m aware, the most helpful book of its kind.

In some earlier versions, I had an opening section on how creative writing ought to be taught—the 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 I’ve 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
.