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 is 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, and unseemly
propensity for crying over nothing); 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.
John Gardner
On Becoming a Novelist
