On Becoming a Novelist
On Becoming a Novelist
John Gardner
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of the plot ideas examined in this book came out of writers’ workshop discussions at SUNY—Binghamton.
CONTENTS
II.
The Writer’s Training and Education
I assume that anyone looking at this preface to see whether or not it would perhaps be worthwhile to buy this book, or take it from the library, or steal it (don’t), is doing so for one of two reasons. Either the reader is a beginning novelist who wants to know whether the book is likely to be helpful, or else the reader is a writing teacher hoping to figure out without too much wasted effort what kind of rip-off is being aimed this time at that favorite target of self-help fleecers. It’s true that most books for beginning writers are not very good, even those written with the best of intentions, and no doubt this one, like others, will have its faults. Let me set down here how and why I’ve written it, and what I try to do.
After twenty-some years of giving readings and public lectures, along with making frequent visits to classes in creative writing, I have learned what questions to expect in the inevitable question-and-answer period—some questions at first glance merely polite (“Do you write with a pencil, a pen, or a typewriter?”); some professorial and freighted with vested interest (“Do you think it’s important that the would-be novelist read widely in the classics?”); and some timid and serious, presented as if they were questions of life and death, which, for the person who asks them, they may well be, such as “How do I know if I’m really a writer?” This book puts together in one place my considered answers to the questions I take to be serious, including some questions I take to be more serious than they may sound to the casual ear. I answer each question directly but also discursively, trying to make sure I cover every aspect of the question, including those the questioner may have intended but didn’t put in words. Some writers, I’ve found, make the general assumption that every question asked in an auditorium or a writing class is essentially frivolous, presented in order to draw attention to the asker, or to flatter the visitor and keep things rolling, or simply from mad whim. I try to err in the opposite direction. I assume, in classrooms and auditoriums, as elsewhere, that human beings are smarter and nobler than misanthropic souls imagine. I doubt that anyone whose interest in novel-writing is fake will bother to read this book, and I assume that anyone who cares deeply about writing will forgive me if I say, on any given subject, more than seems necessary, since he will sympathize with my purpose, which is to be useful and thorough.
Everything I say here is of course one writer’s opinion—opinion grounded in years of writing, reading, teaching, editing, and arguing with my writer friends, but still only opinion, since art does not afford the testable certainties of geometry or physics. For that reason some of what I say will undoubtedly be, for some readers, off the mark or even offensive. On some subjects—for instance, writers’ workshops—one is tempted to pull punches or rest satisfied with oversimplified answers; but I’m assuming, as the primary reader of this book, an intensely serious beginning novelist who wants the strict truth (as I perceive it) for his life’s sake, so that he can plan his days and years in ways beneficial to his art; avoid false paths of technique, theory, and attitude; and become as quickly and efficiently as possible a master of his craft.
This book is elitist, in a sense. I do not mean that I write mainly for that very special novelist who desires only a small coterie of intensely sophisticated, well-educated, and subtle readers, though to that writer I would recommend this book, both as an aid and as an argument for humane moderation. The elitism I mean is more temperate and middle class. I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of—serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive. Fine workmanship—art that avoids cheap and easy effects, takes no shortcuts, struggles never to lie even about the most trifling matters (such as which object, precisely, an angry man might pick up to throw at his kitchen wall, or whether a given character would in fact say “you aren’t” or the faintly more assertive “you’re not”)—workmanship, in short, that impresses us partly by its painstaking care, gives pleasure and a sense of life’s worth and dignity not only to the reader but to the writer as well. This book is for the beginning novelist who has already figured out that it is far more satisfying to write well than simply to write well enough to get published.
This is not essentially a book on craft, though here and there I give what some may find valuable pointers. It’s not that I disapprove of books on craft or believe no good book of the kind can be written—in fact, I’ve written such a book myself and use it with my students, changing and expanding it year by year, with the expectation that sooner or later it will seem to me worth making public. But the object of the present book is more grand and more humble: I try here to deal with, and if possible get rid of, the beginning novelist’s worries.
Trying to help the beginning writer overcome his worries may at first seem a rather foolish project my memory of my own apprentice years and my experience with other beginning writers suggest that it’s not. The whole world seems to conspire against the young novelist. The young man or woman who announces an intention of becoming an M.D. or an electrical engineer or a forest ranger is not immediately bombarded with well-meant explanations of why the ambition is impractical, out of reach, a waste of time and intelligence. “Go ahead, try it,” we say, secretly thinking: If he can’t make the grade as an M.D., he can always become an osteopath. Writing teachers, on the other hand, and books about writing, not to mention friends, relatives, and professional writers, are quick to point out the terrible odds (thereby increasing them) against anyone’s (ever, anywhere) becoming a successful writer. “Writing takes a rare and special gift,” they say (not strictly true); “The market for writing gets worse every year” (largely false); or, “You’ll starve!” (maybe so). And the discouragement offered by other human beings is the least of it. Writing a novel takes an immense amount of time, at least for most people, and can test the writer’s psyche beyond endurance. The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he’s fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow—long, careful studies of the hopes, joys, and disasters of creatures who, strictly speaking, do not exist. The writer may be undermined by creeping misanthropy, while the writer’s wife, or husband, is growing sulky and embarrassed. The idiots who write for TV pull in money by the fistful, while this saint among mortals, the novelist, pumps gas, types memos, or sells life insurance to keep food in the mouths of his children. Or the writer may slide into alcoholism, the number one occupational hazard of the trade.
Almost no one mentions that for a certain kind of person nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist, if not for its financial rewards then for others; that one need not turn into a misanthrope or a drunk; that in fact one can be a more or less successful M.D., engineer, or forest ranger, even follow the unfashionable profession of housewife, and
also
be a novelist—at any rate, many novelists, both great and ordinary, have done it. This book tries to give honest reassurance by making plain what the life of a novelist is like; what the novelist needs to guard against, inside himself and outside; what he can reasonably expect and what, in general, he cannot. It is a book that celebrates novel-writing and encourages the reader to give it a try if he or she is seriously so inclined. The worst that can happen to the writer who tries and fails—unless he has inflated or mystical notions of what it is to be a novelist—is that he will discover that, for him, writing is not the best place to seek joy and satisfaction. More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.
Nearly every beginning writer sooner or later asks (or wishes he dared ask) his creative writing teacher, or someone else he thinks might know, whether or not he really has what it takes to be a writer. The honest answer is almost always, “God only knows.” Occasionally the answer is, “Definitely yes, if you don’t get sidetracked,” and now and then the answer is, or should be, “I don’t think so.” No one who’s taught writing for very long, or has known many beginning writers, is likely to offer an answer more definite than one of these, though the question becomes easier to answer if the would-be writer means not just “someone who can get published” but “a serious novelist,” that is, a dedicated, uncompromising artist, and not just someone who can publish a story now and then—in other words, if the beginning writer is the kind of person this book is mainly written for.
The truth is that there are so many magazines in the United States—not to speak of all those elsewhere—that almost anyone, if he’s stubborn enough, can sooner or later get a story published; and once the beginning writer has been published in one magazine (some obscure quarterly, let us say), so that he can say in his covering letter to other editors, “Previous fiction of mine has appeared in such and such a journal,” the better his chances are of reaching publication in other magazines. Success breeds success. For one thing, publication in five or six obscure magazines virtually guarantees eventual success in some not so obscure magazine, because editors, when in doubt, tend to be swayed by a record of publication elsewhere. And for another thing, the more the beginning writer writes and publishes (especially when he publishes after an exchange of letters with an intelligent editor willing to give advice), the more confident and proficient the beginning writer becomes. As for getting a not very good novel published, the possibilities are richer than one might think—though the pay may not be good. There are always publishers looking for new talent and willing to take risks, including a good number of publishers actively seeking bad fiction (pornography, horror novels, and so forth). Some young writers, by a quirk of their nature, cannot feel they are really writers until they have published somewhere,
any
where. Such writers are probably wise to do it and get it over with, though they’d be wiser yet to improve their skills and publish somewhere better, for the future’s sake. It’s hard to live down one’s shoddy publications, and it’s hard to scrap cheap techniques once they’ve worked. It’s like trying to stop cheating at marriage or golf.
To answer the serious young writer’s question responsibly, the writing teacher, or whoever, needs to consider a variety of indicators, none of them sure but each of them offering a useful hint. Some of these have to do with visible or potential ability, some with character. The reason none of the indicators is foolproof is partly that they’re relative, and partly that the writer can improve—changing old habits of technique or personality, getting better by stubborn determination—or simply grow at a later stage from a probable nonwriter to a probable success.
One might begin the list anywhere; for convenience, let me begin with verbal sensitivity.
Good grades in English may or may not go with verbal sensitivity, that is, with the writer’s gift for, and interest in, understanding how language works. Good grades in English may have more to do with the relative competence, sensitivity, and sophistication of the teacher than with the student writer’s ability. It is not quite true to say that every good writer has a keen feeling for sentence rhythms—the music of language—or for the connotations and diction levels (domains) of words. Some great writers are great in spite of occasional lapses—clunky sentences, feeble metaphors, even foolish word choices. Theodore Dreiser can write: “He found her extremely intellectually interesting”—language so cacophonous and dull most good writers would run from it; yet few readers would deny that Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy
are works of art. The writer with a tin ear, if he’s good enough at other things, may in the end write deeper, finer novels than the most eloquent verbal musician.
