From John Garner, "The Art of Fiction," No. 73 ...
INTERVIEWER
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that literary techniques can really be taught?
Some people feel that technique is an artifice or even a hindrance to “true
expression.”
GARDNER
Certainly it can be taught. But a teacher has to know technique
to teach it. I've seen a lot of writing teachers because I go around visiting
colleges, visiting creative writing classes. A terrible number of awful ones,
grotesquely bad. That doesn't mean that one should throw writing out of the
curriculum; because when you get a good creative writing class it's
magisterial. Most of the writers I know in the world don't know how they do
what they do. Most of them feel it out. Bernard Malamud and I had a
conversation one time in which he said that he doesn't know how he does those
magnificent things he sometimes does. He just keeps writing until it comes out
right. If that's the way a writer works, then that's the way he had to work,
and that's fine. But I like to be in control as much of the time as possible. One
of the first things you have to understand when you are writing fiction—or
teaching writing—is that there are different ways of doing things, and each one
has a slightly different effect. A misunderstanding of this leads you to the
Bill Gass position: that fiction can't tell the truth, because every way you
say the thing changes it. I don't think that's to the point. I think that what
fiction does is sneak up on the truth by telling it six different ways and
finally releasing it. That's what Dante said, that you can't really get at the
poetic, inexpressible truths, that the way things are leaps up like steam
between them. So you have to determine very accurately the potential of a
particular writer's style and help that potential develop at the same time, ignoring
what you think of his moral stands.
I hate nihilistic, cynical writing. I hate it. It bothers
me, and worse yet, bores me. But if I have a student who writes with morbid
delight about murder, what I'll have to do (though of course I'll tell him I don't
like this kind of writing, that it's immoral, stupid, and bad for
civilization), is say what is successful about the work and what is not. I have
to swallow every bit of my moral feelings to help the writer write his way, his
truth. It may be that the most moral writing of all is writing that shows us
how a murderer feels, how it happens. It may be it will protect us from
murderers someday.
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