
This book has been gathering dust on my shelf for two years; it was required for an MFA workshop I signed up for and promptly dropped when I found a comedy writing class at another school. It's always been one of those books I'll get to someday, but when Jennifer (almost done with the aforementioned MFA program!) said the Gardner books were most helpful for her, I decided now was the perfect time to tackle one.
Something I really loved about this book was how Gardner encourages honestly - he doesn't glorify the writing life, nor does he make you feel bad if you can't stick it out.
"The worst that can happen to the writer who tries and fails ... is that he
will discover that, for him, writing is not the best place to seek joy and
satisfaction. More people fail at becoming successful businessmen
than fail at becoming artists."
I've been stuck in a strange writer's block limbo; I'm getting ideas for stories, essays, and sketches, but when I sit down and put the pencil to the paper, the sentences don't flow. I have limited views in my head of characters or things that should happen, but that's as far as it goes. I feel like I've lost my ability to spin a simple thing into a full blown story, and it's a little alarming. I'm not even close to quitting writing, but it's still nice to read encouragement that isn't pushy.
Workshops and education are given their own section. I found it refreshing that Gardner didn't hail MFA programs as the answer, despite his background in the academic sector. He's good at showing the pros and cons to everything he brings up, putting information out there for the reader to interpret and decide what is best for themselves.
+ "Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum 'Write about what you
know.' … Preliminary good advice might be: Write as if you were a movie camera."
+ "What [the beginner] does not need is a teacher who imposes his own solution,
like an algebra teacher who tells you the answer without showing how he got
there, because it is process that the young writer must learn."
Gardner writes for the "young writer" or "beginning writer," but he also addresses getting published, getting an agent, and interpreting feedback from editors, lumped together in a section appropriately titled Publication and Survival. The section after that? Faith. And in that section was exactly what I needed to read, after explaining my writer's block up there:
"The writer suffering writer's block can think of good plots and characters, or
anyway he can think of good starts, which is all a healthy writer needs, but he
can't persuade himself that they're worth writing down or developing. It's all
been done before, he tells himself. And if he does, by a supreme effort, get down
a few sentences, he finds the sentences disgustingly bad."
Does he have a solution? Well...
"If children can build sand castles without getting sand castle block, and if
ministers can pray over the sick without getting holiness block, the writer
who enjoys his work and takes measured pride in it should never be troubled
by writer's block. But alas, nothing's simple. … Give the general oddity
of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures."
No. No he doesn't.
It's funny I thought Annie Dillard's The Writing Life would have more generalized writing tips/feedback/whatever, but seemed to discount short stories as pointless and imply novels were all that was worth writing… yet here is a book titled On Becoming a Novelist, and Gardner is taking time to address issues with short stories and even poetry. Doing so didn't make the book feel like it was tackling too much, either - it was all well-balanced and informative regardless of what you're writing. "The real message is, write in any way that works for you: write in a tuxedo or in the shower with a raincoat or in a cave deep in the woods."





