the writing workbench

Gardner Reveals the Driving Forces Behind Quality Fiction

From pages that I dog-eared:

On reflection we see that the great writer's authority consists of two elements. The first we may call, loosely, his sane humanness; that is, his trustworthiness as a judge of things, a stability rooted in the sum of those complex qualities of this 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 say 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; that is (by his own harsh standards), his knowledge, drawn from long practice, of what will work and what will not.

What this means ... is that in order to achieve mastery he must read widely and deeply and must write not just carefully but continually, thoughtfully assessing and reassessing what he writes, because practice, for the writer as for the concert piantist, is the heart of the matter.

The Value of Experience

The argument that what the writer really needs is experience in the world, not training in literature--both reading and writing--has been so endlessly repeated that for many it has come to sound like gospel. We cannot take time for a full answer here ... The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs. The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fictiton: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. The writer's business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actitons by means of which they come to know themselves and reveal themselves to the reader.

Believing in the Dream

We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving through Russia ... We read on--dream on--not passively but actively, worrying about the choices the characters have to make, listening in panic for some sound behind the fictional door, exulting in characters' successess, bemoaning their failures. In great fiction, the dream engages us heart and soul; we not only respond to imaginary things--sights, sounds, smells--as though they were real, we respond to fictional problems as though they were real: We sympathize, think, and judge. We act out, vicariously, the trials of the characters and learn from the failures and successes of particular modes of action, particular attitudes, opinions, assertions, and beliefs exactly as we learn from life. Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.

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