Gardner promises to show us the proper way for the young writer to achieve artistic mastery. Doesn’t that sound marvelous? We take him to task on his analysis and advice on the techniques of Imitation, Vocabulary, The Sentence, Point of View, Delay and Style from chapter 6 of The Art of Fiction.

Enough with the theoretical, in this episode we get some practical advice out of Gardner’s book, The Art of Fiction. Specifically, he tells us what we’re doing wrong. We discuss a few of what Gardner call’s clumsy errors before moving onto Faults of the Soul – Sentimentality, Frigidity, and Mannerisms.

After last episode’s mother of all chapters, we get a reprieve – a much shorter and lighthearted chapter devoted to those weird genres of metafiction, deconstruction, and jazzing around (that last one we’re pretty sure Gardner made up.) While we do discuss Gardner’s take, we mostly just have fun geeking out over our favorite examples of the genres.

Moving along to Chapter 3 in The Art of Fiction. We go to war over the various dichotomies that (what Gardner claims) make good fiction, his weird beef against experimental fiction–or what he calls “intellectual toys,” and why he chose a weird moment in Helen of Troy to serve as his example to illustrate the novel.

Onto Chapter 2 of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. We begin with Gardner’s opinions about grammar, and our opinions about those opinions. Then we move on to his definition of genres and the great importance of “verisimilitude.”