The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner Page A

question is: What is she to do when she comes back? She can’t just stand there. Forced by the necessity of his story to bring her back and provide her with some action, however brief, the writer is forced to think up some further meaning for the character (it may help to ask, in this case, how the slave’s defiant independence differs from Helen’s). It is partly in this way that the fictional process forces the writer to say more than he thought he could; that is, to make discoveries.
    At some point the writer stops planning and starts writing, fleshing out the skeleton that is his plan. Here too he is partly in control of and partly controlled by the fictional process. Again and again, in the process of writing, he will find himself forced to new discoveries. He must create, stroke by stroke, powerfully convincing characters and settings; he must more and more clearly define for himself what his overall theme or idea is; and he must choose and aesthetically justify his genre and style.
    Character is created partly by an assembly of facts, including actions, partly by symbolic association. The first needs no comment. Menelaos is, say, rather older than Helen, a famous warrior, a poor rhetorician, a stern king but one easily moved to tears. These are simply facts. The writer makes up or borrows from legend as many of them as he needs, supports them with appropriate habits and gestures, and shows in the behavior of other characters when they deal with Menelaos that the king is who and what he seems. But often our deepest sense of character comes from symbolic association. We frequently learn about fictional characters as we identify people in the game called Smoke, or sometimes called Essences.
    In this game the player who is it thinks of some famous personage living or dead, such as Gandhi, Charles de Gaulle, or Frank Sinatra, then tells the other players, “I am a dead Asian,” “I am a dead European,” “I am a living American,” or whatever. The players, in order, try to guess the name of the personage by asking such questions as “What kind of smoke are you?” “What kind of weather are you?” “What kind of animal are you?” “What part of the human anatomy?” And so on. The player who is it answers not in terms of what the personage might have liked to smoke, what weather he might have preferred, etc., but what the personage would
be
if he were incarnated not as a human being but as, say, a certain kind of smoke—cigarette, cigar, pipe, or, more specifically, Virginia Slims, White Owl, or Prince Albert pipe tobacco. As they ask their questions, the players develop a powerful sense of the personality they’re seeking, and when finally, on the basis of the information they’ve been given, someone makes the right guess, the result is likely to be an orgasmic sense of relief. Obviously the game cannot be played with the intellect; it depends on metaphoric intuition. Yet anyone who plays the game with good players will discover that the metaphors that describe the personage whose name is being sought have, at least cumulatively, a remarkable precision.
    In fiction, characterization by symbolic association can be infinitely more precise than it can ever be in the game, partly because (in the final draft) the metaphors are carefully considered, and partly because we are dealing with a consistently good player. The writer may use metaphor directly, as when he tells us Paris is like a dapper, slightly foolish fox, or he may work for symbolic association in subtler ways. He may place a character in the weather that metaphorically expresses his nature, so that unwittingly we make a connection between the gloom of Menelaos and the gloom of the weather at his back. Or the writer may subtly incline us to identify Helen’s character with the elegantly wrought knife with which she carves.
    In fleshing out his characters, the writer does not ordinarilythink out every implication of every image he introduces at the