In reading through Gardner’s book for our in-class assignment, this being my second time going through the text now, I am again troubled by his introduction to the creative process. This isn’t anything reflective of the general information he is giving – which is as sound in this chapter as in all others – or even in his tone, which alternates between something resembling jocular informality and something else that one can’t help but feel at a base level is unabashedly acerbic. Again, this is not at all what troubles me about this introduction!
But it does tie into it. For instance, Gardner’s assertion that “mastery [is] the art of breaking rules” (8) but that these rules must first be known to then be broken (correctly?) is solid advice, on any front, but especially in the artistic arena, where the concept of “rules” is some Platonic abstraction, an existential problem of no small measure that Gardner himself notes. You have to know the rules to break the rules, but you can never know the rules; and we all get a private in-joke chuckle out of that, but as far as providing practical advice to someone who wants to write, well it just doesn’t. His assertion is by no means wrong, but what it is is discouraging.
It’s not Gardner at fault any more than it is myself I suppose, because this is the very nature of didactic text trying to educate on a subject like art. He even mentions, by way of one example, in this chapter, how you would probably get more material for your writing out of time spent talking to people in bars about their jobs than you would actually working the jobs. Which probably isn’t wrong, but it goes to illustrate just how tangentially the creative process actually applies to real world concepts, or vice-versa. Break the rules. Or don’t. Who cares? Make sure you know them when you break them. But you won’t. But who cares? It’s a despicable conundrum, the sort of Catch-22 that makes you throw your character’s hands up. Until you realize that’s cliché and so you think about writing a different action instead, until you realize that ‘who cares?!’ and you go with the hands up gesture anyway, and it may or may not work given the context. It calls into being the nagging question: the very possibility of actually being able to learn good writing. Maybe it can’t be done!
In later chapters, Gardner expounds on more concrete concepts that could be used to eventually talk even the most harried young writer off that proverbial ledge, but there is a certain amount of vague frustration – that Gardner absolutely recognizes and laments in his text – that comes along with the effort to learn to be a writer. Sometimes I worry, personally, introspectively, that the points he makes, ones I am familiar with, create an undue sense of timidity in my writing that will necessarily hamstring some bit of prose that should have never been strung, pulled taut, that should have been left flapping free, doing its thing in the wind. And then I read back over that sentence and think ‘Dear God, did you read that awful metaphor?! Please teach me these rules! I need to know!”
In other news, I added a cat to my story. I named it Chekhov. No I’m joking, I named it Gun. It sits there on the mantle, does nothing, and then wanders off, never to be seen again. In an alternate timeline it would have been named Schrodinger and wouldn’t have been there at all, but you can bet your ass it would have done something by the end of the story.