Free On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner Page A

it’s highly unusual for anyone to become a successful writer if he cannot put in several hours every day at his typewriter. (Even for a successful professional, it can take a while to get into the mood, takes hours to get a few good pages of rough draft, and many many hours to revise them until they will bear repeated readings.) Of necessity the writer is unlike those of his friends who quit work at five; if he has a wife and children, the writer cannot pay as much attention to them as his neighbors do to theirs, and if the writer is worthy of his profession, he feels some guilt over this. 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. Even if he has published a story or two in respectable periodicals, the writer doubts himself. In my teaching years, I have again and again seen young writers with obvious talent berate themselves almost to the point of paralysis because they feel they’re not fulfilling their family and social obligations, feel—even when several stories have been accepted—that they’re deluding themselves. Each rejection letter is shattering, and a parent’s gentle prod—“Don’t you think it’s time you had children, Martha?”—can be an occasion of spiritual crisis. Only strong character, reinforced by the encouragement of a few people who believe in the writer, can get one through this period. The writer must somehow convince himself that he is in fact serious about life, so serious that he is willing to take great risks. He must find ways—mischievous humor, or whatever—of deflecting malicious or benevolent blows to his ego.
    Only the writer who has come to understand how difficult it is simply to tell a first-rate story—with no cheap manipulations, no breaks in the dream, no preening or self-consciousness—is able to appreciate fully the quality of “generosity” in fiction. In the best fiction, plot is not a series of surprises but an increasingly moving series of recognitions, or moments of understanding. One of the most common mistakes among young writers (those who understand that fiction is storytelling) is the idea that a story gets its power from withheld information—that is, from the writer’s setting the reader up and then bushwhacking him. Ungenerous fiction is first and foremost fiction in which the writer is unwilling to take the reader as an equal partner.
    Say, for example, that the writer has decided to tell the story of a man who has moved into the house next door to the house of his teen-age daughter, a girl who does not know that the man is her father. The man—call him Frank—does not tell the girl—she may as well be Wanda—that she is his daughter. They become friends and, despite the difference in age, she begins to feel a sexual attraction.
    What the foolish or inexperienced writer does with this idea is hide the father-daughter relationship from the reader as well as from the daughter until the last minute, at which point he jumps out and yells: “Surprise!” If the writer tells the story from the father’s point of view and withholds the important information, the writer is false to the traditional reader-writer contract—that is, he has played a trick on the reader. (The so-called unreliable narrator favored in much contemporary fiction is not a violation of the contract. It is not the storyteller but a fictitious narrator, a character, that we must watch and learn to distrust. If the storyteller himself is unreliable, we avoid him as we would a mad sea captain or axe murderer.)
    If, on the other hand, the story is told from the daughter’s point of view, the device is legitimate, since the reader can only know what the daughter knows; but the writer has mishandled his idea. The