I’m still working away at my new novel-nearly 1,000 words per day-but I have been reading books my characters would read, as well as books on writing.

Here are some quotes from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction :

NOTES ON THE FICTIONAL PROCESS
Common Errors

-95- Passive voice is virtually useless in fiction

-96-The temptation to explain should almost always be resisted. A good writer can get anything at all across through action and dialogue. The writer should especially avoid comment on what his characters are feeling.

Not describing how characters are feeling is something I find impossible to do-most other things he talks about I can do either easily or with a little work, but not this.

-97- In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled.

-98- [Regarding the error of frigidity] The writer lacks the kind of passion all true artists possess. He lacks the nobility of spirit that enables a real writer to enter deeply into the feelings of imaginary characters.

Technique

-99- Much of what goes into a real story or novel goes in not because the writer desperately wants it there but because he needs it.

-100- Fiction is made up of structural units: a passage of description, a passage of dialogue, an action. The good writer treats each unit individually, developing them one by one.

-101-Working unit by unit, always keeping in mind what the plan of his story requires him to do but refusing to be hurried to more important things, the writer achieves a story with no dead spots, no blurs, a story in which we find no lapses of aesthetic interest.

I do this but not in the order in which he describes. I do the general descriptions and absolutely needed-for-plot dialogue (what I call the ‘play’) then on the second read put in the description and transition scenes. On the third go I make sure everything flows and there’s nothing extraneous.

-102- The writer may be pretty clear about where his experiment will lead, but insofar as he’s a true artist, he does not force the results.

This is one of my favourite parts about writing-not knowing exactly how I’m going to get to the end or if the end will even be what I expect it to be.

-103- Art does not imitate reality, but creates a new reality.

-104- Reality is a place we cannot get to from here.