JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #76
November 4, 2021
One of the things I like about John Gardner is that he takes a philosophical, abstract view on the craft of fiction. In The Art of Fiction he writes, "Trustworthy aesthetic universals do exist, but they exist at such a high level of abstraction as to offer almost no guidance to the writer" (p. 3). So it is that when discussing the aesthetically necessary features of fiction, it is difficult to generate any real framework that will guide development of a story. There are simply too many possible stories with too many possible structures for any concrete advice to provide for them all without requiring tomes of caveats. And yet, when we dig down into the foundational values that inform the necessary or definitional features of story or fiction, we can begin to outline a guiding rubric by which to evaluate what we have done after the fact in order to suggest improvement. It is useful for a writer or writer’s workshop to establish an aesthetic framework by which to guide critique and revision.
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