On Becoming a Novelist was one of the first books I read when I decided to start taking writing seriously. I thought I was a good writer, but I knew I wasn't good enough, and I knew I had a lot to learn about publishing and the business end of being a novelist.
Nowhere in the annals of literature will you find a better overview of such things than in John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist. This book is the gentlest way to prepare yourself for the enormity of the titular task. Gardner has a friendly, almost grandfatherly way about his writing, and he manages to rattle off the enormous list of challenges that face the budding writer without making the situation sound hopeless. That in itself is a feat.
But the main thing that Gardner did for me personally was introduce me to the concept of the fictive dream. In On Becoming a Novelist, he put it like this:
"This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer's process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things--sees them clearly--and in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later..."
Have you ever heard a clearer account of what it's like to write a story?
Gardner makes a very big deal of this "vivid and continuous dream", and he managed to convince me that it should be the goal of all novels. What the novelist does is live a waking dream, and then try to place that same dream in the mind of a complete stranger using only words. Could anything be more magical? But Gardner takes care to illustrate how fragile the magic is; how easily it can all be ripped away by a careless word or an under-developed plot turn. Gardner helped to reinforce the concept of transparency for me, pointing out how the tiniest idiosyncrasies of language can jerk the reader out of this fictive dream.
This friends, is the reason that a novelist must become a master of grammar and story structure. Editors are great, but you can't walk into this career expecting other people to do all the hard parts. The writer must bear the burden of technicality in equal measure, or the fourth wall falls and the fictive dream is shattered. When a reader says a book "was kind of a slow read..." this is what has happened. The writer has inadvertently placed sloppy, imprecise words where the fourth wall should be, and the fictive dream never begins.
On Becoming a Novelist has much more to offer than this insight (most of it concerning the business side of writing) but this is the part that stuck with me the most. Without this insight, I never would have taken it upon myself to read the remainder of the books in my writing bible.
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