quotes from the saltiest how-to-write-fiction book I’ve ever read
i.e. On Becoming a Novelist (Gardner, 1983)—dated but surprisingly insightful.
“… mindless, tasteless, ignorant schools of criticism publishing fat journals and meeting in solemn conclave, completely misreading great writers, or celebrating tawdry imitation writers to whom not even a common farm duck would give his ear …”
“It is said (I think—sometimes by accident I make these things up) …”
“The writer with the worst odds—the person to whom one at once says, ‘I don’t think so'—is the writer whose feel for language seems incorrigibly perverted. The most obvious example is the writer who cannot move without the help of such phrases as ‘with a merry twinkle in her eye,’ or 'the adorable twins’, or 'his hearty, booming laugh'—dead expressions, the cranked-up zombie emotion of a writer who feels nothing in his daily life or nothing he trusts enough to find his own words for.”
“Every child knows intuitively … what the requirements are for good fiction, but by the time he’s reached high-school age, he’s grown a trifle confused, bullied by his teachers into reading what is in fact trash … By the time he’s a sophomore or junior in college, he’s likely to be quite profoundly confused, imagining, for instance, that ‘theme’ is the most important value in fiction.“
"If he takes enough English literature courses, the young would-be writer can learn to block every true instinct he has. He learns to dismiss from mind the persistent mean streak in J. D. Salinger, the tough-guy whining sentimentality in Hemingway … He can learn that writers he at first thought quite good, usually women … are 'really’ second class.”
“… well-meaning nincompoops (editors, reviewers, academicians) …”
“A psychological wound can be helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven. Some fatal childhood accident for which one feels responsible; a sense that one never quite earned one’s parents’ love; shame about one’s origins … or embarrassment about one’s own physical appearance: all these are promising signs.”
“Thousands of Americans stand for hours in streams trying to catch fish. The novelist’s work is no more visibly useless than amateur fish-catching.”
“One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception—at least some of the time—incompetent or crazy … [two pages later] Editors are the bravest, most wonderful people on earth.”
[re. writer’s block] “All of the conventional forms of breaking inhibition can be employed to get things rolling—self-hypnosis, drunkenness and smoking, or falling in love.”
“Occasionally, mean-spirited people have written good books, but the odds of it are long.”
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