Free The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner Page A

is the actualization of its initial potential.
    Two central tenets, for the traditional point of view, are, first, the Coleridgian notion that true literary art is “the repetition in the finite mind of the infinite ‘I AM’”—the idea, that is, that, like God opening his fist, the writer creates everything at once, his characters, their actions, and their world, each element dependent on the others—and, second, the concomitant notion that an important part of what interests us in good fiction is our sense, as we read, that the writer’s imitation of reality’s process (“the ineluctable modality of the visible,” as Stephen Dedalus puts it) is accurate; that is, our feeling that the work, even if itcontains fabulous elements, is in some deep way “true to life.” The obvious question is: How can the writer possibly do so much at once?
    The answer is that he does and he doesn’t. He can think, consciously, of only a few things at a time; but the process by which he works eventually leads him to his goal. To anyone who thinks about it carefully, this must at first seem a rather strange statement: “The process by which he works eventually leads him to his goal”—as if the process had some kind of magic in it, some daemonic will of its own. Indeed, some writers—not the least of them Homer—have taken that point of view, speaking without apology of Muses as, in some sense, actual beings, and of “epic song” and “memory” (not quite in our sense) as forces greater than and separate from the poet. We often hear even modern writers speak of their work as somehow outside their control, informed by a spirit that, when they read their writing later, they cannot identify as having come from themselves. I imagine every good writer has had this experience. It testifies to the remarkable subtlety of fiction as a mode of thought.
    The fictional process is the writer’s way of thinking, a special case of the symbolic process by means of which we do all our thinking. Though it’s only an analogy, and in some ways misleading, we might say that the elements of fiction are to a writer what numbers are to a mathematician, the main difference being that we handle fictional elements more intuitively than even the subtlest mathematicians handle numbers. As Hobbes said, “We cannot think about things but only about the names of things”; in other words, to build up a complicated argument we need abstractions. If we wish to think usefully about wildlife preservation, we must abstract the dying white rhinoceros at our feet to dying white rhinoceroses in general, we must see the relationship (another abstraction) between dying white rhinoceroses and dying tigers, etc., and rise, finally, to the abstraction “dying wildlife.” In the same way, a writer consciously or unconsciously abstracts the elements of fiction.
    By the elements of fiction I mean all of the discrete particles of which a story is built, particles that might be removed, undamaged, from one story and placed in another; for example, particles of the action, “event ideas” such as kidnapping, pursuit of the elusive loved one, a murder, loss of identity, and so on; or particles that go to make up character, such as obesity and each of the things obesity may imply, or stinginess, or lethargy; or particles that go to make up setting and atmosphere. In isolation, each element has relatively limited meaning; in juxtaposition to one another, the elements become more significant, forming abstractions of a kind—higher units of poetic thought. All the arts are made up of such fundamental elements, which we find repeated in painting after painting, symphony after symphony, arranged and built up (as complex molecules are built up from atoms) in an infinite variety of ways. From painting we might take the example of the mountain (one element) and the tree (another) that in juxtaposition have a standard but variable function: The majestic mountain is silhouetted