John Gardner (1983 [1994]) The Art of Fiction. Notes on Craft for Young Writers.

I’m not young. Many, or most, wouldn’t consider me a writer. Certainly John Gardner wouldn’t. For Gardner good writing, ‘creates a vivid and continuous dream’.   Everything else follows.

Look, for example, at the brouhaha involving Sir Christopher Nolan's latest film, The Odyssey. As most of us would expect, rave reviews followed the money.

But I loved the dissenting voice of Emily Wilson. Her 2017 translation of Homer's Odyssey was cited by the director as an influence on his adaptation of the poem.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd692n215ndo

"The writing is abysmal," she said. "None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible."

"It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth."

Gardner did not believe good writers came from the gods. For him good writing came from good reading and constant practice. ‘Twelve to fourteen hours a day’ will ensure publication, he opined.

Monomania.

Anything else was fraud. ‘The shoddy writer wants only publication’.  (Guilty on all counts.)

‘Sanity in a writer is merely this. However stupid he may be in his private life, he never cheats in writing.’

Wilson, perhaps naively, accuses Sir Christopher Nolan of cheating.  Homer's Odyssey, Wilson’s Odyssey, is not Nolan’s Odyssey. A flimflam of men with beards and swords and beautiful women in pretty dresses that don’t take them off enough.  It’s all ancient Greek to her.

The craft of writing has no human heart beating. But a set of empty sets that doesn’t test its characters. Truth doesn’t need a verdict, but it needs to be true. Believable.

For truth to be present it must be in the details. Hence her caustic remarks about food, its sensory delights as much part of being human as love and lust.

Beautiful people doing beautiful things strays into the hollow world of Gardner’s ‘Frigidity’. A cold and meaningless world which reduces art—the highest form of meaning—to a bauble of decoration. A desecration of Art and Writing.

Fiction should be moral, Gardner argued. It should search for truth, not in heroes or villains but in the choices we make that make us human. Writers shouldn’t start with answers, but questions. Not to question makes us bad writers.

Worse than that it makes us inhuman. Subject to the biggest deceptions—see for example, the success of right-wing propaganda in everyday life—and most importantly as writers and humans, fooling yourself, some of the time, then all of the time.

Gardner may be old school and that is our Odyssey. In re-reading Gardner, I see most of my notes were on ‘rhythm that never stumbles’.  I wish that was true then and now. I’m more factious and far from creating the continuous factious dream that is fiction. Maybe later. Maybe someday. Maybe never. If you don’t read and write what matters to you, you’ll stop. Stop being you. Dream on.