Goodbye Gardner, Hello Bradbury
Thinking of reading The Art of Fiction, "Young Writer?" Listen to this podcast first. Despite dying in a motorcycle crash in 1982, John Gardner achieved immortality (at least in...
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Come for the Plot. Stay for the Stripper
Wow! We've gotten to the final chapter of John Gardner's book, The Art of Fiction and it's all about plotting your short story, or novella, or novel (there are,...
Techniques
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...
Common Errors
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...
Metafiction, Deconstruction, and Jazzing Around
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...
Interest and Truth
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...
Basic Skills, Genre, and Fiction as Dream
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...
Writing with Gusto
Ray Bradbury shares his secrets for how he wrote so many unforgettable short stories in the first two chapters of his craft book, Zen in the Art of Writing.