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.