On Becoming A Novelist (1983) by John Gardner

Author:John Gardner [Gardner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Writing, writing; fiction; vocational guidance
Published: 2012-01-30T10:20:03+00:00

writers, it ought to be mentioned, is not that they are worse people than those who wrote in Pollyanna. They are almost exactly the same people: idealists, people who simple-mindedly long for goodness, justice, and sanity; the difference is one of style. This same science fiction writer's character Jack the Ripper reacts in howling moral outrage when he learns how the Utopians have made him their plaything: A psychopath, a butcher, a lecher, a hypocrite, a clown.

"You did this to me! Why did you do this?"

Frenzy cloaked his words. . . .*

A young writer firmly hooked on bad science fiction, or the worst of the hard-boiled detective school, or tell-it-like-it-is so-called serious fiction, fashionably interpreting all experience as crap, may get published, if he works hard, but the odds are that he'll never be an artist. That may not bother him much.

Hack writers are sometimes quite successful, even admired.

But so far as I can see, they are of slight value to humanity.

Both Pollyanna and disPollyanna limit the writer in the same ways, leading him to miss and simplify experience, and cutting him off from all but fellow believers. Marxist language can have the same effects, or the argot of the ashram, or com-puter talk ("input"), or the weary metaphors of the business-and-law world ("where the cheese starts to bind"). When one runs across a student whose whole way of seeing and whose emotional security seem dependent on adherence to a given style of language, one has reason to worry.

Yet even linguistic rigidity of the kind I've been discussing is no sure sign of doom. Though some would-be writers may be incurably addicted to a particular way of oversimplifying language, others who seem no better off prove curable, once they've understood the problem and worked on it. What the writer must do to cure himself is rise above his own acquired bad taste, figure out how his language habits are like and unlike

*Over the Edge, p. 96.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.