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

time he introduces it. He writes by feel, intuitively, imagining the scene vividly and copying down its most significant details, keeping the fictional dream alive, sometimes writing in a thoughtless white heat of “inspiration,” drawing on his unconscious, trusting his instincts, hoping that when he looks back at it later, in cool objectivity, the scene will work. So he proceeds through the story, event by event, character by character. Each time he sits down for another day’s work, he may read over what he’s done, making minor revisions and getting a run on the passage where he stopped. Different writers have different ways of working, but the likelihood is that the writer’s chief concern, at this stage, is with achieving a totally convincing, efficient, and elegant action. With some exceptions, the details he brings in he brings in for that purpose, none deeper.
    But at some point, perhaps when he’s finished his first draft, the writer begins to work in another way. He begins to brood over what he’s written, reading it over and over, patiently, endlessly, letting his mind wander, sometimes to Picasso or the Great Pyramid, sometimes to the possible philosophical implications of Menelaos’ limp (a detail he introduced by impulse, because it seemed right). Reading in this strange way lines he has known by heart for weeks, he discovers odd tics his unconscious has sent up to him, perhaps curious accidental repetitions of imagery: The brooch Helen threw at Menelaos the writer has described, he discovers, with the same phrase he used in describing, much later, the seal on the message for help sent to the Trojans’ allies. Why? he wonders. Just as dreams have meaning, whether or not we can penetrate the meaning, the writer assumes that the accidents in his writing may have significance. He tries various possibilities; for instance, the possibility that Helen’s wish for independence is partly self-delusion. The idea grows on him. He reads through the story again and becomes increasingly convinced. He makes tiny alterations. Helen’s character deepens and flowers. In response, Menelaos slightlychanges; so does Paris. Slowly, painstakingly, with the patience that separates a Beethoven from men of equal genius but less divine stubbornness, the great writer builds the large, rockfirm thought that is his fiction.
    What happens in the writer’s development of characters happens also in his development of atmosphere and setting. The megaliths and walls that form the salient feature of the cities of the Achaians, antithetical to the flowered walkways and the topless towers of Ilium, grow more stern, more alarming in their solidity with each revision. Menelaos’ scepter, which he uses as a cane, takes on daemonic force.
    Since somewhere near the end of his planning of the fiction, the writer has known pretty clearly what the general idea or
theme
of the work is to be. By theme here we mean not “message”—a word no good writer likes applied to his work—but the general subject, as the theme of an evening of debates may be World-Wide Inflation. Since early on, it has been clear that in our Helen story the theme has had to do with community and individual values. (Another writer, making different choices about plot and character, might well have emerged with a different theme, such as Life versus Art—the Achaians on one side, the Trojans on the other, with Helen in the crossfire as both wife and lover, both keeper of the household goods and fanatical artist when she works at her loom—or the writer might have organized the story in terms of Body and Soul.) Given his choice of community and individual values as his theme, the writer sharpens and clarifies his ideas, or finds out exactly what it is that he must say, testing his beliefs against reality as the story represents it, by examining every element in the story for its possible implications with regard to his theme. He thinks about Menelaos’ scepter, for