the writing workbench
"When I say writing... it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind." - Robert Louis StevensonNovel Writing
A novel is loosely a long fiction prose involving character and action and telling a story. The novel is longer (at least 50,000 words) and more complex than either the short story or the novella.
Novel Ingredients
The Goods
This book is rich, complex and in a subtle way haunting. Sounds like a wine review, right?
Even as the title suggests the audience is for "Young Writers," Gardner wants us to learn by throwing us into the deep-end of the pool. More on The Art of Fiction...
On the Road to Artistic Mystery
At some point the writer stops planning and starts writing . Here too he is partly in control of and partly controlled by the fictional process. . in the process of writing, he will find himself forced to new discoveries. . Character is created partly by an assembly of facts, including actions, partly by symbolic association. . But often our deepest sense of character comes from symbolic association. We frequently learn about fictional characters as we identify people in the game called Smoke, or sometimes called Essences. . In fiction, characterization by symbolic association can be infinitely more precise than it can ever be in the game, partly because (in the final draft) the metaphors are carefully considered, and partly because we are dealing with a consistently good player. - The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
Fiction seeks out truth. Granted, it seeks a poetic kind of truth, universals not easily translatable into moral codes. But part of our interest as we read is in learning how the world works; how the conflicts we share with the writer and all other human beings can be resolved, if at all; what values we can affirm and, in general, what the moral risks are. The writer who can't distinguish truth from a peanut-butter sandwich can never write good fiction. - The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
