On Becoming a Novelist Quotes

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., On Becoming a Novelist

“As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., On Becoming a Novelist

“Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly
natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most
of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or
incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);
obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to
believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an
apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness
for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper
respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying
over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation
or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,
smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and
neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);
remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual
feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange
admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,
the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings
for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of
cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,
and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable
addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Because his art is such
a difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the world
as visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from high
school or college are becoming junior partners in prestigious
law firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may be
still sweating out his first novel.”
― john gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It’s hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one’s prose.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“What the best fiction does is make powerful affirmations of familiar truths...the trivial fiction which times filters out is that which either makes wrong affirmations or else makes affirmations in a squeaky little voice. Powerful affirmation comes from strong intellect and strong emotions supported by adequate technique.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough
sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any
way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised,knowing the characters' actions may change. It makes no difference
how clumsy the sketch is—sketches are not supposed
to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over
and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one's
story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing
what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one
gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one's head,
gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the
characters' problems and hopes.”
― john gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“the chief offense in bad fiction: we sense that characters are being manipulated, forced to do things they would not really do.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Writer's block comes from the feeling that one is doing the
wrong thing or doing the right thing badly. Fiction written for
the wrong reason may fail to satisfy the motive behind it and
thus may block the writer, as I've said; but there is no wrong
motive for writing fiction. At least in some instances, good
fiction has come from the writer's wish to be loved, his wish
to take revenge, his wish to work out his psychological woes,
his wish for money, and so on. No motive is too low for art;
finally it's the art, not the motive, that we judge.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Good writers may “tell” about almost anything in fiction except the characters’ feelings. One may tell the reader that the character went to a private school (one need not show a scene at the private school if the scene has no importance for the rest of the narrative), or one may tell the reader that the character hates spaghetti; but with rare exceptions the characters’ feelings must be demonstrated: fear, love, excitement, doubt, embarrassment, despair become real only when they take the form of events—action (or gesture), dialogue, or physical reaction to setting. Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“It is the nature of stupid people to hide their perplexity and attack what they cannot grasp.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“It is this experience of seeing something one has written come alive—literally, not metaphorically, a character or scene daemonically entering the world by its own strange power, so that the writer feels not the creator but only the instrument, or conjurer, the priest who stumbled onto the magic spell—it is this experience of tapping some magic source that makes the writer an addict, willing to give up almost anything for his art, and makes him, if he fails, such a miserable human being.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Part of the writer's problem may be thee wrong kind of appreciation: hen he does work he knows to be less than he's capable of, his friends praise precisely those things he knows to be weak or meretricious. The writer who cannot write because nothing he writes is good enough, by his own standards, and because no one around him seems to share his standards, is in a special sort of bind:
the love of good fiction that gets him started in the first place makes him scornful of the flawed writing he does (nearly all first-draft writing is flawed) and his sense that nobody cares about truly good fiction robs him of motivation.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“The writer sensitive to language finds his own metaphors, not simply because he has been taught to avoid clichés but because he enjoys finding an exact and vivid metaphor, one never before thought of, so far as he knows.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“In writing short stories—as in writing novels—take one
thing at a time. (For some writers, this advice I'm giving may
apply best to a first draft; for others, it may hinder the flow at
first but be useful when time for revision comes.) Treat a short
passage of description as a complete unit and make that one
small unit as perfect as you can; then turn to the next unit—
a passage of dialogue, say—and make that as perfect as you can.
Move to larger units, the individual scenes that together make
up the plot, and work each scene until it sparkles.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“The question one asks of the young writer who wants to
know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what
you want to do? Really want to do?"
If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is:
Do it. In fact, he will anyway.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum
"Write about what you know." But whether you're writing
about people or dragons, your personal observation of how
things happen in the world—how character reveals itself—can
turn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advice
might be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly
what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,
not that they can necessarily write it down.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious
novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again,
work some more, month after month, year after year, and then
one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you
can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it's published and
you read the printed book you see a thousand.) This tortuous
process is not necessary, I suspect, for the writing of a popular
novel in which the characters are not meant to have depth and complexity, where character A is consistently stingy and character
B is consistently openhearted and nobody is a mass of
contradictions, as are real human beings. But for a true novel
there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking.
We've all heard the stories of Tolstoy's pains over Anna Karenina,
Jane Austen's over Emma, or even Dostoevsky's over Crime and Punishment, a novel he grieved at having to publish prematurely,though he had worked at it much longer than most popular-fiction writers work at their novels.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel.
One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then to
the deep craziness of life itself—as when in Anna Karenina, Levin proposes to Kitty in the same weird way Tolstoy himself proposed to his wife. Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.”
― john gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Often one finds novelists are people who learned in childhood to turn, in times of distress, to their own fantasies or to fiction, the voice of some comforting writer, not to human beings near at hand.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or “way,” an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious—a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand—and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Sometimes when one cannot stand the story or novel one
is working on, it helps to write something else—a different
story or novel, or essays venting one's favorite peeves, or exercises
aimed at passing the time and incidentally polishing up
one's craft. The best way in the world for breaking a writer's
block is to write a lot. Jabbering away on paper, one gets
tricked into feeling interested, all at once, in something one is
saying, and behold, the magic waters are flowing again. Often
it helps to work on a journal, since that allows the writer to
write about those things that most interest him, yet frees him
of the pressure of achievement and encourages him to develop
a more natural, more personal style.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“One
cannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the story
is worthwhile because until one has finished writing the story
one does not know for sure what the idea is; and one cannot
judge the style of a story on the basis of a first draft, because
in a first draft the style of the finished story does not yet exist.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“When a writer first begins to write, he or she feels the same
first thrill of achievement that the young gambler or oboe
player feels: winning a little, losing some, the gambler sees the
glorious possibilities, exactly as the young oboist feels an indescribable
thrill when he gets a few phrases to sound like real
music, phrases implying an infinite possibility for satisfaction
and self-expression. As long as the gambler or oboist is only
playing at being a gambler or oboist, everything seems possible.
But when the day comes that he sets his mind on becoming a professional, suddenly he realizes how much there is to learn, how little he knows.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Daemonic compulsiveness can kill as easily as it can save.
The true novelist must be at once driven and indifferent. Van
Gogh never sold a painting in his life. Poe came close with
poetry and fiction, selling very little. Drivenness only helps if
it forces the writer not to suicide but to the making of splendid
works of art, allowing him indifference to whether or not the
novel sells, whether or not it's appreciated. Drivenness is trouble
for both the novelist and his friends; but no novelist, I
think, can succeed without it. Along with the peasant in the
novelist, there must be a man with a whip.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Descubrí lo que todo buen escritor sabe: que conseguir escribir exactamente lo que se pretende decir ayuda a descubrir lo que se pretende decir.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist