I never even met him: John Champlin Gardner

I was a shy, diffident child, tender of heart, lacking in confidence, and self-esteem who grew into a young woman with those same qualities.

It took middle age, hormonal changes, the “hard knocks” that life brings, and the sheer indignation of betrayal, to bring forth, much too late in life, the grit, the Irish courage, and the brave heart, that lived within me. Thank goodness for those hormonal changes because I needed a brave heart simply to survive as a human being,  but even more if I was to triumph as a writer.

Except for that brave heart, my other personality traits made me an unlikely writer, or even a student of fiction, for such a writing teacher as John Gardner. Maybe it is best that I never met him.  Nevertheless,  he had a part in teaching me to write.

Gardner’s,  The Art of Fiction: Notes on craft for Young Writers, is a desk top companion that I return to for writing advice and sometimes when courage  fails me.

It is not that Gardner, the perfectionist, would have given me encouragement to write-he wouldn’t have; his standards, his list of requirements, and background for those who aspired to write was strict, and lengthy. I wouldn’t have been a candidate.

If Gardner encourages me it is because we agreed on a fundamental point of writing that he called, The Fictional Dream. It was his belief, and my feeling, long before I ever read a word that he wrote, that it is the author’s art, and a purpose of fiction,  to create a world, word by word, for the reader to escape into.

Creating that fictional dream, and telling the story without distracting, or awakening the reader from that dream is my aspiration as a writer.  Maintaining the dream, and not awakening the reader from dreaming often stops me from dragging in distractions, and my personal point of view, into the story.

Sustaining the dream keeps me to the point, focused on my characters, my plot and all of the solutions and surprises that creativity brings; it keeps me away from belaboring  my own beliefs, it sends me on to do what the Story Teller is expected to do: tell the story.