The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
By John Gardner
Categories: Arts & Photography
The Art of Fiction (Vintage) is novelist John Gardner's guide for aspiring writers, drawn from his years teaching creative writing. Gardner argues that good fiction creates a vivid and continuous dream in the reader's mind, and explains how false notes, clumsy prose and authorial intrusion break it. He discusses genre and literary aesthetics, plot, point of view, style and the common faults of beginning writers, and closes with practical exercises in description, dialogue and plotting.
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- Ryan Holiday: “Last week, I called my girlfriend at home and asked her to get my copy of The Art of Fiction. Somewhere near the front, I said, is a line that uses dreaming as metaphor for the concept of aesthetic distance. Sure enough, tabbed and highlighted was the idea”