Free On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner

tends to be sought out for reviews or jacket blurbs of bad books by his friends.) And stubbornness will prove useful, in later life as in college, in protecting the writer from those who try to give him bad advice. As inept college writing teachers try to get the beginning writer to write fiction more like that of Jane Austen, or Grace Paley, or Raymond Carver, so well-meaning nincompoops later (editors, reviewers, academicians) are sure to put pressure on the writer to make him more nearly what they would be if they could write fiction. Not, of course, that the writer’s stubbornness should be absolute. Some advice turns out to be good, however distasteful at first.
    If the writer understands that stories are first and foremost stories, and that the best stories set off a vivid and continuous dream, he can hardly help becoming interested in technique, since it is mainly bad technique that breaks the continuousness and checks the growth of the fictional dream. He quickly discovers that when he unfairly manipulates his fiction—pushing the characters around by making them do things they wouldn’t do if they were free of him; or laying on the symbolism (so that the strength of the fiction is diminished, too much of its energy going into mere intellect); or breaking in on the action to preach (however important the truth he’s out to preach); or pumping up his style so that it becomes more visible than even the most interesting of his characters—the writer, by these clumsy moves, impairs his fiction. To notice such faults is to begin to correct them. One reads other writers to see how they do it (how they avoid overt manipulation), or one reads books about writing—even the worst are likely to be of some use—and above all, one writes and writes and writes. Let me add, before I leave this subject, that when he reads the work of other writers, the young novelist should read not in the manner of an English major but in the manner of a novelist. The good English major studies a work to understand and appreciate its meaning, to perceive its relationship to other works of the period, and so on. The young writer should read to see how effects are achieved, how things are done, sometimes reflecting on what he would have done in the same situation and on whether his way would have been better or worse, and why. He reads the way a young architect looks at a building, or a medical student watches an operation, both devotedly, hoping to learn from a master, and critically, alert for any possible mistake.
    The development of fully competent technique calls for further psychological armor. If a writer learns his craft slowly and carefully, laboriously strengthening his style, not publishing too fast, people may begin to look at the writer aslant and ask suspiciously, “And what do you do?” meaning: “How come you sit around all the time? How come your dog’s so thin?” Here the virtue of childishness is helpful—the writer’s refusal to be serious about life, his mischievousness, and his tendency to cry, especially when drunk, a trick that makes persecutors quit. If the pressure grows intense, the oral and anal fixations swing into action: one relieves pressure by chewing things, chattering mindlessly, or straightening and restraightening one’s clothes.
    The point is a serious one, and I do not mean to trivialize it. In my own experience, nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. To most people, even those who don’t read much, there is something special and vaguely magical about writing, and it is not easy for them to believe that someone they know—someone quite ordinary in many respects—can really do it. They tend to feel for the young writer a mixture of fond admiration and pity, a sense that the poor fellow is somehow maladjusted or misinformed. No human activity I know of takes more time than writing: