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John Gardner, author and creative writing
teacher and also professor of medieval literature, presented The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers in two parts:
1. Notes on Literary-Aesthetic Theory.
Intuition
plays a great role in writing:
“Art depends heavily on feeling,
intuition, taste. It is feeling, not some rule, that tells the abstract painter
to put his yellow here and there, not there, and may later tell him that it
should have been brown or purple or pea-green.
The
great writer has an instinct for those things.
He must think as cleanly as a
mathematician but he must also know by intuition when to sacrifice precision
for some higher good, how to simplify, take short cuts, keep the foreground up
there in front and the background back.”
“When an artist of true authority
speaks—someone like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Dostoyevsky, or
Melville—we listen, all attention, even if what he says seems at first a little
queer.
The great writer’s authority consists
of two elements. The first we may call, loosely, his same humanness; that is,
his trustworthiness as a judge of things, a stability rooted in the sum of
those complex qualities of his character and personality (wisdom, generosity,
compassion, strength of will) to which we respond as we respond to what is best
in our friends, with instant recognition and admiration, saying, “Yes, you’re
right, that’s how it is!”
The second element, or perhaps I
should force, is the writer’s absolute trust (not blind faith) in his own
aesthetic judgments and instincts, a trust grounded partly in his intelligence
and sensitivity—his ability to perceive and understand the world around him—and
partly in his experience as a craftsman.”
2. Notes on the Fictional Process.
Put
a snake in every scene:
“A scene will not be vivid if the
writer gives too few details to stir and guide the reader’s imagination;
neither will it be if the language the writer uses is abstract instead of
concrete.”
Faults
of soul can be corrected:
“Sentimentality (not sentiment!), in
all its forms, is the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause.
Frigidity occurs in fiction whenever
the author reveals by some slip or self-regarding intrusion that he is less
concerned about his characters than he ought to be—less concerned, that is,
than any decent human being observing the situation would naturally be.
Mannered writing is writing that
continually distracts us from the fictional dream by stylistic tics that we
cannot help associating, as we read, with the author’s wish to intrude himself,
prove himself different from all other authors.”
*****
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