Last night, with very little to occupy my mind, I pulled down John Gardner's The Art of Fiction and thumbed through the back part, "Exercises." I thought some more free writing exercises in my class would be nice, and sure enough Gardner had some great ideas. For example, 24. Without an instant's lapse of taste, describe a person (a) going to the bathroom, (b) vomiting, (c) murdering a child.
Another one I noticed was, 28. Write a short story about some well-known, legendary figure, which I have done before (Ben Franklin) and will be doing again soon (Grigorii Rasputin).
I find it hard not to look up to John Gardner, or at least to his implied author, the ghost he left behind in his books (both novels, such as The Sunlight Dialogues and Grendel, and also books on writing, such as The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist). He writes straightforward, mindfully, aware of the subtlest undercurrents in fiction. He has little if any patience for stupidity or pretenders. He is thoughtful and fair. He requires no explaining, though, and wrote in the 1970s, which dates his rhetoric a bit and makes him accessible more to serious authors and less to students. I also wonder that, having exposed some of the worse bits about universities, Gardner alienated himself from being taught in classrooms. I'm told that he could be quite aggressive in life, and that another of his books, On Moral Fiction, ruffled quite a few literary feathers and probably set his career back decades. All this before he died in 1984, of course.
This semester, to change the topic slightly, a student gave me another book called The Art of Fiction, this time by Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead, and that got me thinking: Why The Art of Fiction and not The Science of Fiction? In most of my graduate seminars, writing is approached very much as a science. We don't ever discuss writing as an art. Not once have I heard that kind of talk. It irritates me and at the same time disappoints me. Drawing classes, of course, can't hide the art portion of their curriculum -- or can they? A drafting class is a class where students learn to draw, after all. Do schools of architecture and drafting receive more funding than schools of illustration?
Art, especially art with a capital A, makes people nervous. It is more difficult to fund an Art than a Science, generally speaking. Most people sense that art is important, and yet few understand why, even going so far as to doubt that importance. So writing becomes a science, but it isn't writing any more, it's composition.
Now, writing contains an elements of science just as surely as drafting contains elements of art -- creativity, I mean. I would call these science elements of writing craft something like that. There are conventions, rules to break, theories, laws, etc. But writing is an art, in the end.
Another one I noticed was, 28. Write a short story about some well-known, legendary figure, which I have done before (Ben Franklin) and will be doing again soon (Grigorii Rasputin).
I find it hard not to look up to John Gardner, or at least to his implied author, the ghost he left behind in his books (both novels, such as The Sunlight Dialogues and Grendel, and also books on writing, such as The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist). He writes straightforward, mindfully, aware of the subtlest undercurrents in fiction. He has little if any patience for stupidity or pretenders. He is thoughtful and fair. He requires no explaining, though, and wrote in the 1970s, which dates his rhetoric a bit and makes him accessible more to serious authors and less to students. I also wonder that, having exposed some of the worse bits about universities, Gardner alienated himself from being taught in classrooms. I'm told that he could be quite aggressive in life, and that another of his books, On Moral Fiction, ruffled quite a few literary feathers and probably set his career back decades. All this before he died in 1984, of course.
This semester, to change the topic slightly, a student gave me another book called The Art of Fiction, this time by Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead, and that got me thinking: Why The Art of Fiction and not The Science of Fiction? In most of my graduate seminars, writing is approached very much as a science. We don't ever discuss writing as an art. Not once have I heard that kind of talk. It irritates me and at the same time disappoints me. Drawing classes, of course, can't hide the art portion of their curriculum -- or can they? A drafting class is a class where students learn to draw, after all. Do schools of architecture and drafting receive more funding than schools of illustration?
Art, especially art with a capital A, makes people nervous. It is more difficult to fund an Art than a Science, generally speaking. Most people sense that art is important, and yet few understand why, even going so far as to doubt that importance. So writing becomes a science, but it isn't writing any more, it's composition.
Now, writing contains an elements of science just as surely as drafting contains elements of art -- creativity, I mean. I would call these science elements of writing craft something like that. There are conventions, rules to break, theories, laws, etc. But writing is an art, in the end.
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