The Writer’s Journey

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.

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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 the writing community) with the posthumous publication of the Art of Fiction

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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, apparently differences). We also learn some fancy plot vocabulary. Oh, and the stripper? Her name is Fanny, and her story...

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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 advice on the techniques of Imitation, Vocabulary, The Sentence, Point of View, Delay and Style from chapter 6 of The...

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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 discuss a few of what Gardner call's clumsy errors before moving onto Faults of the Soul - Sentimentality, Frigidity, and...

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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 around (that last one we’re pretty sure Gardner made up.) While we do discuss Gardner’s take, we mostly just have...

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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 experimental fiction–or what he calls “intellectual toys,” and why he chose a weird moment in Helen of Troy to serve...

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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 definition of genres and the great importance of “verisimilitude.”

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