JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #75
October 28, 2021
I’ve been thinking recently about something John Gardner writes about, adumbrated in this quote from his critical work, On Moral Fiction: "What the writer understands, though the student or critic of literature need not, is that the writer discovers, works out, and tests his ideas in the process of writing. Thus at its best fiction is, as I’ve said, a way of thinking, a philosophical method" (p. 107). Gardner is pointing out that a writer who has mastered his craft has mastered a way of seeing the world, of discovering underlying truths of human existence.
Sometimes we approach the craft of fiction as a series of rules that define good prose or an appropriately structured story, when perhaps we should consider craft as a series of lenses that provide ways of seeing into the heart of a fictive situation. If we think of an idea that may be the seed for a story as a question about human emotions and moral conflict, then craft advice can be seen as guidance for digging into the complexities of such questions. Considerations of character and plot, of point of view and psychic distance, of narrative voice, of show and tell, are all decisions that will either give us access to or deny us vision on the human-moral implications of our fiction. Understood this way, our exploration of the possibilities for the craft of fiction takes on much greater import.
Next: An Aesthetic Framework