I despaired of ever becoming a writer. Then I read John Gardner’s “On Becoming a Novelist.”
John Gardner was an American author who wrote the novels Grendel and The Sunlight Dialogues, among others. He also taught medieval literature and was a pioneering creative-writing teacher.
In Gardner’s book, On Becoming a Novelist, he lists the storyteller’s “several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility . . .”
(Bullet-point format is mine.)
- “wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections)”
- “churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true)”
- “childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing)”
- fixations (“excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering”), with (“nervous cleanliness and neatness”)
- “powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation)”
- “a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion”
- “patience like a cat’s
- “a criminal streak of cunning”
- “psychological instability”
- “recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, in inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories”
I was never so happy to be neurotic.
“Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course,” Gardner concludes. “Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.”