THE ICE PICK

On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner. New York, Norton, 1999. 150 p. $12.00. Includes: index. ISBN: 0-393-32003-0.

A distillation of John Gardner’s twenty years of experience teaching creative writing and the wisdom gleaned from writing his own twenty-five books, this delightful book has rightfully become a classic work for anyone who wants to write novels.

Written with clarity, passion, humility, and a fine sense of humor, Gardner at once instructs and inspires. It is "not essentially," he says, "a book on craft, though here and there I give what some may find valuable pointers. . . . I try here to deal with, and if possible get rid of, the beginning novelist’s worries."

With thoroughness, wit, and elegance, he presents advice and encouragement.

For those concerned with whether to outline or not, he recommends outlining, but says, "some respectable writers simply pour out onto paper everything that comes into their heads, then sift, edit, rearrange, and rewrite until a story of some kind emerges; others plan carefully and stick to the plan as closely as possible, so long as the characters don’t object. . . . The real message is, write in any way that works for you."

He discusses how to break writer’s block, how to "get faith in yourself," and when to give up and quit. ("The true novelist is the one," he says, "who doesn’t quit.") He talks about the difficulty of trying to get down on paper what you see in your imagination and about not only how sometimes the writer enters a "strange, magical state" where the words pour from a "deep, flowing vision" and the writing "comes alive," but how to make that happen more often.

In regards to the rule to "show, don’t tell," he says, some things "can be summarized or implied. In general the rule is simply this: Anything necessary to the action’s development must be shown dramatically. . . . [And] with rare exceptions the characters’ feelings must be demonstrated."

He warns against staying with a writing class that makes you feel miserable, saying, "A bad writing class doesn’t only fail to teach writing, it can make one give up."

Too much "intellectual analysis" of your writing "may become crippling." At some point a writer "feels his way to the solution; rather than drawing back from the fictional dream to look at what he’s doing, he solves the problem by plunging deeper into the dream."

"Nothing is sillier," Gardner says, "than the creative writer’s dictum ‘Write about what you know.’ But . . . the true writer’s scrutiny of imagined scenes both feeds on and feeds his real-life experience. . . . Your personal observation of how things happen in the world--how character reveals itself . . . [in the] most trivial gestures . . .--can turn a dead scene into a vital one." The trick is for the author to "get it down . . . without cheapening or falsifying," to write "down exactly what he sees and feels, carefully revising time after time until he fully believes it, noticing when what he’s saying is mere rhetoric or derivative vision, noticing when what he’s said is not noble or impressive but silly. . . . Detail is the lifeblood of fiction."

"Good fiction," says Gardner, "sets off a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind. . . . All writing requires at least some measure of trancelike state: the writer must summon out of nonexistence some character, some scene, and he must focus that imaginary scene in his mind until he sees it as vividly as, in another state, he would see the typewriter and cluttered desk in front of him, or the last year’s calendar on his wall. . . . One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel."

"It’s true," he says, "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. . . . This book is written 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."

It is impossible for me in a short review to give more than a hint of the treasures in this book. Gardner’s enthusiasm is contagious, and the book is a quick, enjoyable read.

I love this book and I think you will too. I recommend it very highly.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Feb. 2005.}