It may be wonderful praise, may be a cautionary tale, that I began this book as a lark undertaken in the midst of two classes on memoir (nonfiction is, I've always believed, my life's work) and serious work rewriting my food memoir's first chapter, and before I'd half-finished Gardner's book, I began a novel.

As inspiration, this is either all of it or a great chill; every sentence in this book is written with the clear undertone, "writing a novel is hard, hard work." That the work is worthwhile is never, certainly, a question; that the work is for everyone is dismissed with an artful textual eye-role from the first. "Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind," he writes in one of his jaw-dropping parentheticals. One wants, upon reading these first few pages, to have an authentic gem of a mind. One is constantly assessing whether her mind, indeed, is worth treasuring, in every page.

Beyond the inspirational sentences and the deeply funny critiques of whole segments of the writing population (and, upon special occasion, a particular writer or work), this book is unusual and ideal in its teaching. I feel that I have a very firm grasp now on the energeic novel, the proper and alternative forms of a denouement, the many different sorts of writing styles (a tale, a yarn, etc.), the use of symbols and emblems and the difference between them, a dozen approaches at re-crafting a sentence, a more careful idea about how to make plot work (and an entire idea about how to design a plot), concepts and words that I didn't know but have seen elegantly in action: profluence, dispositio, architectonic novel.

In short, I was not just given the kernel of a novel through Gardner's exercises, but I was taught sentence by sentence how to take all my expensive education and my far dearer experience and turn it upon the tools of novel-writing. Can you learn the craft of writing by reading a book? Not-just, but almost. Off I go, to write.