Way back when I was more earnestly learning the craft of writing, I was reading through several different books on writing fiction. Almost immediately, I felt that I was reading the same book over and over again. It was if they were all cribbing from the same set of Cliff Notes. Show don’t tell. Give your characters a distinctive trait.
Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers was different, both philosophical and practical. Academic and grounded. Finally, a guide to writing that went beyond storytelling abstractions or superficial suggestions on character development, plotting, point of view, and themes.
The book is divided into two parts.
The first part is more theoretical with chapter titles “Aesthetic Law and Artistic Mastery,” “Basic Skills, Genre, and Fiction as Dream,” “Interest and Truth,” and “Metafiction, Deconstruction, and Jazzing Around.” It focuses on the artistic aspect of writing, the underpinnings that a writer should understand when telling a story. I enjoyed the last chapter. Metafiction and deconstruction were new concepts to me at the time. Of course, metafiction and deconstruction have permeated the mainstream, including movies, as articulated in the movie Scream, as well as the movies of David Lynch.
The second part focuses on the craft of writing with the best discussion of fiction writing technique and style that I have ever read. Chapter titles in this part: “Common Errors,” “Technique,” and “Plotting.” I have to admit, the second half of the book made a greater impression on me than the first. My writing benefited when I became more aware of common errors, such as opening a sentence with an infinitive verb phrase.
Art of Fiction also includes some great exercises. In particular, I liked the long sentence exercise: Write three effective long sentences, each at least one typed page, each involving a different emotion. Several other exercises develop the technique of leading the reader paragraph by paragraph and establishing tone. These exercises include writing about the discovery of a dead body before the body is discovered or writing about an old woman whose detestable husband has died but without mentioning the husband or the death.
I would rank Art of Fiction as one of the top ten influential books that I have read. Alas, while my writing has improved from a craft perspective, my approach to fiction has been overly methodical, forcing structure and symbolism into my stories, often to the point of killing it.
I actually read Art of Fiction before I read any of Gardner’s fiction, which I did do eventually, starting with Grendel and moving on to the others. I recently finished Mickelson’s Ghost after a long Garnder hiatus, and I think I have now read them all. Of all Gardner’s fiction that I have read, I found Nickel Mountain to be the most engaging. This particular novel was clearly the source material for the 1995 movie, Heavy. I don’t recall if the novel was credited or not, but I felt the movie, while OK in its own right, was weak and tepid when compared to the novel. (I always felt that novellas seemed to be about right in scope to be the best source for movies. A good novel will always get gutted when adapted to a two hour movie.)
The first Gardner novel that I had read, Grendel, was an example of one of the metafiction techniques that Gardner describes in Art of Fiction. Prior to Art of Fiction, however, he slammed metafiction and postmodern fiction pretty hard in another book, On Moral Fiction. It is a bit of an irony that Gardner actually uses many of the techniques that he railed against—even if he didn’t go to quite the same lengths as a William Gass or John Barth.
Grendel provides an example of the metafiction technique that Gardner describes in Art of Fiction as taking a traditional story and retelling the story in a way that undermines something about the original. In Grendel, the Beowulf epic told from the Monster’s point of view. Gardner suggests that rewriting Beowulf in this way undermines manipulative, authoritarian, and propagandist elements of the original.
Learning how to write fiction could be time consuming but very rewarding; when your story is ready to be published, consider learning how to make an eBook for quick and easy distribution of your masterpiece.
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4 Responses
I read Art of Fiction when I was in college. Turned out the com professor I had was a student of Gardner’s when he taught (I think someplace in Pennsylvania–but could’ve been Berkeley–don’t ask me how I managed to confuse the two). We had several interesting conversations of which I remember just the bit about Gardner being more hippie-like than he sounded in his non-fiction and that he died in a motorcycle accident.
I found Art of Fiction an incredible inspiration and a great tool, though I vaguely recall that Gardner believed writing cannot be taught–which I think is an absurd position, not only for a teacher, but for anyone who ever learned to write. In my mind, it’s on the same plane as any spoken language. Were you born speaking? Then you CAN learn to write. I’ve also learned that writing skills alone will not get you published, paid, or recognized (in fact, some of the writers who’ve made the NYT Bestseller List have only done so by divine intervention. Or so it would seem as nothing short of a miracle would get me to read their work again. It all comes down to what you want to accomplish. Want to make money? Write a story with commercial appeal. Want to be posthumously revered? Write literature. There is a great blend there somewhere that our best writers are able to master. Larry McMurtry, with his masterpiece, Lonesome Dove, is one. Another is the work of James Lee Burke. He wrote and published at small university presses until he turned to detective fiction. Before you poo-poo the genre, you might read a literary criticism published about his series entitled “James Lee Burke and the Soul of Dave Robicheaux.” In it, Barbara Bogue illustrates Burke’s immense talent with passages from his novels in which Burke employs metaphor to tell modern “morality plays” and in which his secondary theme is almost always the hubris of man. Well worth reading, Burke’s best are Dixie City Jam and The Tin Roof Blowdown (in which Burke recreates the post-Katrina New Orleans to a degree that is both heart-rending and thought-provoking).
I’m a Steinbeck fan. I wasn’t born that way. I was forced to consume Steinbeck in high school and grew to enjoy the experience as I revisited him in college and again as an adult. I attribute my love of Steinbeck to two aspects of his writing: the simplicity of language (remarked upon by Stephen King in On Writing) and the characters that people his stories, the fringe people of our society who really are the unrecognized majority. James Lee Burke has been called the William Faulkner of our time. Robert Penn Warren was his role model and mentor. I think they were both worthy of his study, but I don’t agree that he’s Faulkner. I would go a step further and say that because of the accessiblity of his prose and the timliness of his subjects, he’s better.
one of my absolute faves. I return to it again and again.
@Michael, I wouldn’t poo poo detective fiction. Although, I am not a fan doesn’t mean it can’t be literary. Science fiction was in the genre doghouse for a while before it gained some literary respect.
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