A post courtesy of BLPG member Reg

John Gardner on Writing

   If I could only have two books by writers on writing, they would be John Gardner’s On Becoming A Novelist and his The Art Of Fiction. The following description of the nature of the writer comes from page 34 of the 1999 Norton edition of the first book above.

   “Another indicator of the novelist’s talent is intelligence – a certain kind of intelligence, not the mathematician’s or the philosopher’s but the storyteller’s – an intelligence no less subtle than the mathematician’s or the philosopher’s but not so easily recognized.

   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 towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know to be 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. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.”

There you have it. Make a little allowance that this came from the 1970’s – allowance only in the way that thoughts are expressed. Gardner is describing the serious literary novelist, not the much more desirable commercial animal.