- But what you gotta do is you gotta write really well and you gotta understand the principles.

The principles are very simple.

They're so simple, they're frightening.

The thing that's so hard about writing is that all that stuff you think you gotta do, you don't gotta do.

(gentle music) (dramatic music) - Hello, I'm Tom Wolfe, and we are here at the University of South Carolina "Writer's Workshop", and our guest today is a writer whose story I think is gonna be encouraging to a great many young writers.

He's a very prolific writer named John Gardner.

The interesting thing is that he was very prolific long before he published anything.

He was sort of like Jack Kerouac 20 years ago, or George Bernard Shaw 70 years ago, the kind of writer who writes and writes and writes and keeps on writing long before anybody is interested in his work.

In the case of John Gardner, he had a big cardboard box about this long, which he kept filling up with manuscript, and some of those manuscripts we all now know very well.

They had titles like "Grendel" and "Nickel Mountain".

But now, in those years when Gardner was not publishing, he became a very angry young man.

This serves you very well in writing in many different ways, and one nice thing about being a writer is that you can be considered a young man up until about the age 45, until the stiff hairs begin sprouting out of your ears.

But anyway, John Gardner, really, I think, has an important lesson for all young writers, which is that the young writers should stop worrying so much about how to publish, all the business about getting an agent and getting to know people in New York and all of those things.

You should just keep writing because it's that conviction that John Gardner had that he can write and that he can publish, that eventually enables him to do it, no matter how long the wait.

- Are there any new trends that you see in writing?

- There are always a lot of new trends, but I really don't like to watch new trends because it doesn't matter.

It seems to me that what young writers sometimes do is thinking of "What is the trend and should I write it, and can I do that," and all kind of thing.

The fact is that whatever the kind of writing, if you're a very good writer, which is kind of the thing I guess we'll be talking about, what makes you a very good writer, you'll be the one they watch, you'll be the new trend.

In other words, it's possible to say, you know, realism has been out for a while.

Now realism is back and everybody's gonna be writing, like, "New Yorker" stories of the 1950s or '40s.

But there are some good realistic writers around, and if they're good enough, they're gonna be, you know, followed.

And it's also true that there are people doing a kind of fiction where, particularly young women writers who have been through the feminist movement and have thought about all that and have decided, "I wanna write serious, intelligent adult fiction, but I also wanna bat my eyelashes and swing my skirt."

So you get a special new kind of fiction, I think never seen before, which is highly intelligent, but also what we think of as traditionally quote, "women's fiction."

It's a neat and kind of powerful stuff, and, you know, maybe that's gonna be the new thing.

But I think the fact is it's simply gonna be who's good, you know?

And if you're a wonderful writer, everybody's gonna say, "That's the new fiction, that's the fiction of the '80s."

- How did you get started writing?

- When I was a kid, my parents, my mother was an English teacher and my father was a farmer who would ride around on a tractor or behind the horses when I was a kid and make up sermons and he goes around to little churches and he does wonderful sermons, unbelievably wonderful sermons.

He's a great poet, and his, you know, subject matter is suggested to him loosely by the Bible.

And he reads a passage, he knows the Bible, I mean, like all those old timers do, backward and forward.

Because whenever one of the Jehovah's Witnesses come to his door, 'cause they only know five texts, you know, they got them down, (class laughing) and then I know there are 5,000 that'll wipe them out and Father always quotes from all the texts and confuses them and turns them into Baptists or Presbyterians.

(class laughing) Anyway, I was around literature, oral literature all my life, and I began, you know, to compete, you know, so they noticed me, you know, write poems about boys and dogs and things.

And then I began to write stories and novels.

My grandmother was a lawyer and she had big law journals, and I mean those ledgers, you know, leather bound with lined paper, with two red lines on the middle.

It's wonderful to write novels in those.

You feel that it's a real book.

I got started doing that all the time.

Then I got to college and I was a chemistry major and I didn't go to labs.

I always figured out I love chemistry, but only the mathematical part.

I mean, I don't like the smell of chem labs, you know?

And I found I was spending all my time writing, and then I eventually shifted to another college where there were some writers and I realized it was possible to become a writer.

- This is Iowa, then at Iowa?

- No, I went to Washington.

After I went to DePaul University to be chem major and then I went to Washington.

And when I saw that ordinary human beings, some of them not even very smart, you know, could be writers and famous writers, then I sort of got thinking, you know, that was kind of suggestion delectation and I was about to, you know, consent.

That's what the devil does to you.

It was actually seeing real writers I think that switched me.

William Carlos Williams, the poet, came to Washington.

Jim and I were talking about this earlier.

And he wrote some famous poems, and at the time, I admired him greatly because all my teachers did.

But he was not very smart, you know?

I mean, he's a good guy to bring to a campus, you know, of young writers because he convinced you, man, if he can be a poet, (class laughing) my uncle can be a poet, you know?

And Robinson Jeffers came, Randall Jarrell came.

They're all good people to bring for this reason.

Will Stephens came, he was pretty smart.

- That's why you're here.

- Yeah, that's it.

And that's how I got there.

What happened then was I went to Iowa because, you know, I got a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which was a wonderful thing in those days.

I went to Iowa, spent two weeks in the Iowa workshop and went up the hill and took Anglo-Saxon in languages because they were so awful.

And they were, I would visit the workshop once a while, and then continued to write all the time and I had a lot of friends there.

The only people at the time I was in Iowa that I respected, kind of admired, were poets.

All people you've heard of, perhaps.

You know, Phil Levine and Donald Finkel and Andrew Collette and Paul Petrie and so on.

Some of them turned out to be very good and serious poets, some of them turned out to be an interesting cranks, one of them turned out to be a madman.

But I didn't want anything to do with those people.

What I wanted was a nice cushy job so that I could have time to learn how to write.

I knew I wasn't gonna learn how to write at Iowa.

And it was a wonderful thing that I went to Iowa, because of John McGall, who did Anglo-Saxon studies and things like that, and I got a degree in medieval literature, which had meant that I could teach three to six hours all in one day and the languages just don't change that much.

They're all dead languages and you don't have to do anything except once in a while, drill a kid on his pronunciation and you get, you know, a whole week to write and a better salary in those days than ordinary English professors got because there was this notion that Anglo-Saxon was harder, which, of course, is not true.

And so it was a cushy thing.

I think it's something writers should think about.

You know, if you're really gonna be a writer, how are you gonna figure it out?

You know, pumping gas takes a lot of time.

Maybe part-time law work is all right, part-time medicine.

But you really have to think about it, you know, how am I gonna do it?

- I would say write a very great deal and publish very little.

What you ought to do, ideally, if I had my ideal young writer that I was bringing along, and I've had some that I felt that were pretty close to being ideal, if they say that they're working in poetry exclusively, I would have them, as I say, write a very great deal.

And then I would have them supervise their own writing and live with what they had written, and at the same time writing new things and working on things in various stages of progress.

And I would have them by this slow torturous process come down to maybe one poem, or certainly no more than two, that were unlike any of the others that they had done, unlike and good according to their standards as writer standards and also according to mine, and I would say, all right, you can publish that one.

You put your name before the public with this poem with your name on it, and the public will associate you with that kind of uniqueness.

But more importantly, you will associate yourself with that kind of uniqueness and will try to reproduce more of it and thereby will acquire a style, which is, if not all important, the next thing to being all important.

It's a slow process, a lot of people don't wanna make the kind of sacrifice, go through the number of frustrations that it takes to operate that way, but it's the best way to operate.

- [Student] Are most of your fictional characters based on real people?

- All fictional characters are always based on real people, but the writer may not be conscious of it.

Often, I've had the experience that I didn't know who I was basing the character on.

I thought it was imaginary, made up.

In "The Sunlight Dialogues", I knew who every character was except for the two main characters, Sunlight Man and Clumly.

And I knew exactly, I mean, I was imitating my cousin Bill and Will Hodge and so on.

And years after it was published, my son, who had never known my Uncle George but had heard stories, a wonderful, peculiar, crazy guy who learned Seneca Indian because he was a traveling salesman to the Senecas and later represented them in some important things and so on.

Anyway, I had told my son stories about this weird and wonderful, brilliant, lower middle class man, and Joel, my son, said to me, "Yeah, it's a funny thing that you based both the cop and the robber, the good guy and the bad guy, on your Uncle George."

I thought about it and that's absolutely true.

The only magician I've ever known in my life was my uncle George and Uncle George was a law and order freak, but he also was out there, you know, demonstrating with the Senecas and it's just a wonderful, but I didn't know it.

I think that you can't do it any other way.

I think that always your characters come from real experience.

A particular gesture comes to, you know, when you're writing, when you're writing fiction, I would say when you're writing poetry, but I know when you're writing fiction, you imagine something inside your head, you know, and you get it with enormous precision.

I think the better the writer, the clearer and sharper and more energetic picture in the mind, so that you see that the significant gesture at this moment is that a man is tapping one finger, right?

And it's not what you'd expect, this kind of tapping, but a particular finger, and you think, what the hell does that mean?

You know, why that finger, you know?

I find myself in restaurants from time to time.

I got caught, in fact, just lately, because Liz looked over and said, "What are you doing?"

Trying to imitate a particular gesture that a guy was doing at another table, trying to figure out what it meant.

It was a very weird gesture.

I did figure out what it meant and very interesting.

But you're spying on that vision in your mind, you're trying to get it absolutely sharp and get it down, you know, powerfully so that the whole psychological, philosophical, the whole thing is clear.

Anyway- - But you can usually discern some motivational characteristic of something by tapping of a finger or?

- You could figure out why people do everything they do, you know, because that's the wonderful thing about human beings is that they're all one species and they all, you know, if you prick them, they bleed and in the same way, if a guy starts twitching.

Now, there are certain kinds of mad people who never, you know, twitch and other kind of mad people twitch all the time and the particular madness or the particular sanity is always in the gesture.

The way people raise their voice, lower their voices.

It's interesting, you know?

Writers, of course, are students of everything.

Other people are students of one or two of the things that writers are students of.

There's a science of body language as, you know, a branch of semiology or something.

Anyway, people sit and study for hours how young people court, you know, in the Indiana or wherever it was, I try to say mess hall, but, you know, dining room.

And, you know, they study, you know, how glances meet and they both look down at the same time, how that's sign one on the way now, and then the boy moves over near the girl, right?

And then they begin talking and then they talk in all swirling motions because they can't point because, you know, and then they do that thing where they sit in like this and, you know, all that kinda stuff.

(class laughing) Well, anyway, I mean, a person who's a student of this kind of language can tell all kinds of things about people because he studied that language in a way that writers don't.

Writers know everything those people know, everything.

Absolutely everything a semiologist would say, they can say.

It's how we know, you know, each other.

How I know that you're, you know, you're hearing me or that I'm hearing you, or you know, because some of you, as I said yesterday, somebody has a look his face, I know what he's thinking 'cause I know if I had that look on my face, what I would be thinking is this.

It's infallible.

Well, if it's not infallible, then you're dealing with a real crook, (class laughing) you know, a cunning, cunning son of a bitch.

The most interesting character in American fiction is the conman, and of course, there are reasons for that.

In a democracy, you know, you have this constant interplay of the wish for liberty and license on one hand, the wish for order on the other hand in a constant sort of business.

And the only one who's really in control is the guy who's thinking something and you don't know what.

- You said that "Nickel Mountain" was the first novel that you wrote, but you revised it over a period of 20 years.

(Speaker clearing throat) I wondered how it changed it over that period.

- Well, it was grotesquely sentimental when it first started.

In fact, the name of Henry Soames was originally Lush Soames, you know?

It shows you the difference, you know?

I just wouldn't let go.

"Now, reader, this guy is fat," you know?

And finally, I pulled back a little.

I had a number of episodes in it which ended up being dropped out and one added.

Mainly, it changed stylistically.

It changed because it was just sentimental.

Part of what made me a writer was a concern with emotion, you know, a very deep concern with emotion and a refusal to be forced to deal with only the emotions that I was sort of told I could deal with.

At the time, Jim said yesterday something about how, you know, you're constantly warned against being sentimental.

And the fact is, of course, that there are real emotions.

He used the example of the real and true feeling of love or feeling between a man and a dog.

Sure, that's been misrepresented time after time.

And the easy way, of course, the cheap way is to say, just never write about men and dogs.

But what a real artist does is he gets that emotion right no matter how many people have botched it and made it look stupid so that it is right for once.

Well, I was going for the same thing, you know, you just couldn't be sentimental.

So I wrote into the novel one long section, which I had originally treated as a shorter thing, which is the section called "The Wedding", in "Nickel Mountain", which is about a girl about to get married.

And I did everything you're not supposed to do and I just pushed it into the wall.

I even got inanimate objects speaking, you know?

Like, "'Go slow,' said the windows", you know?

I mean, and I think you can't catch me at sentimentality anywhere there.

I mean, it's a tour de force exercise of an angry young writer, you know?

Angry because nobody would publish me, you know?

I was sure I was better than those other kids in the workshop, you know, the ones that were in Iowa.

I was sure I was better than those people who kept publishing and getting prizes and stuff, and they were doing all these damn safe things.

I'll tell you a terrible fact, which is that, you know, 15 years I didn't get published except for one thing in "The Northwest Review" because they had a grant which involved doing things about Indians and I had a story about an Indian, so they took it.

But I mean, obviously the only reason, in fact, they even told me that.

But I didn't get published at all.

And so I got so discouraged, you know, I had sitting in my drawer "Resurrection", "Wreckage of Agathon", "Grendel", "Sunlight Dialogues".

All sitting there, all had been rejected.

"Grendel", an editor who later became my editor, said it was a wonderful children's book, but it's just too violent for children and so on.

And anyway, I was really getting mad.

And I knew I was original.

I knew that at that time, nobody wrote like that.

And so I just decided, screw it and I started writing poetry and I sent out poems.

And you could imagine, you know, a novelist, a dedicated novelist, starts writing poetry.

They're gonna be derivative, you know?

They're the most predictable regular poems you ever saw.

I sent them to good magazines.

I sent them to, you know, "Kenyon Review", which was then the sort of one of the Kenyon's review.

I never had a poem rejected.

That made me so angry, I almost quit.

But luckily last time, some chickens came home to roost, because I had also had a little magazine in San Francisco where I'd published some people, brand new writers unheard of, named Joyce Carol Oates and Bill Gass and so on.

And as it happened, just as I was quitting, Bill Gass was sitting in New York in an office with a guy named David Siegel who was saying, "Mr.

Gass, you are incredible.

Are there anymore of those out there in the hinterlands like you?"

And Bill Gass was saying, "There's this crazy longhaired freak John Gardner used to run a magazine, and I think he writes, you ought to talk to him."

He knew, I mean, he'd read my stuff.

And so I got a letter from David Siegel, and with no interest about three weeks later, you know, I boxed up all my fiction, I didn't even sort it, and sent it off to David Siegel and he took it.

He took the whole thing.

- He did, I didn't- - But then, he got fired.

(class laughing) I mean, he just got "The Resurrection" halfway through New American Library and they fired him, sold the place.

Bennett Cerf had it as kind of tax write off, and typical Bennett Cerf absurdity, he decided to see, you know, if he could make some money on this thing so he hired fancy people and did real art.

And he did make money, made money hand over fist as Bennett Cerf always did, he had the Midas touch, so he got rid of it, you know?

And it became a religious and so and so kind of thing.

David Siegel went to Harper and he brought out the second book in the box he'd bought, and then he was fired.

Then he went to Knopf, where they had just hated me, I had terrible rejection letters from Knopf, and he died.

He went there and there were my things, and I got my Knopf contract, and then David died, unfortunately, for all of us.

And Knopf inherited me and they brought out the box of books.

But it was really lucky, you know?

The moral of the story is start a little magazine.

You sort of, you just have to recognize that the presidents of big companies mostly, you know, literary publishing, have degrees in business administration.

One of them once told me, you know, "God save me from art.

If I get a mystery story, I can predict to the volume how many I'll sell.

And if I get a historical romantic, I can predict to the volume how many I'll sell.

And then some (censored) sends me art," you know?

It's true, (laughing), you can't tell if Knopf is gonna go or Italo Calvino, or who knows, you know?

That's why they're artists.

But what happens is you just publish, you know?

I think what happens really is you don't worry about it.

At a certain point, it's gonna start bugging you, you know, and then I think you worry about it.

But most people start worrying about publishing before they're ready to publish, you know?

And that's no good, I mean, that's just wasted energy.

But what you gotta do is you gotta write really well and you gotta understand the principles.

The principles are very simple.

They're so simple, they're frightening.

The thing that's so hard about writing is that all that stuff you think you gotta do, you don't gotta do, you know?

What you gotta do is just get it right and getting it right means very simple things, you know?

Like I told you yesterday what I think it means.

It means, you know, create, if you're talking about fiction, a vivid and continuous stream in the reader's mind, you know?

Absolutely vivid because it's got enough detail and it's the right detail, and it's not the same old detail that somebody else, you know, gave and so on.

Just everything that goes with vivid.

Think about, figure it out, get it vivid.

Continuous, don't distract the reader with a grammatical error or shifting to the wrong character at the wrong time.

You've gotta go over it a thousand times, a thousand times.

Take six months on a short story of 20 pages until it's right, it's brilliant and perfect and nothing is in the wrong place.

Okay, vivid and continuous, and concerned is the third thing.

You've just got to be concerned about the characters so you don't cheat on them and bully them and get something wrong.

And then fulfilled is the fourth thing.

And when that's done, you got everybody beat, you know?

You're just the best writer in town.

Then you start publishing because you can write wonderful, wonderful stuff and send it out.

As in the Jerzy Kosinski, you know, joke where somebody sent out his stuff and everybody rejected and said, "You know, this is good, but it's a little like Kosinski but not as profound," and so on.

So you publish in little magazines, you publish in "Atlantic" once in a while, whatever you can get.

Gradually, that builds up.

Editors want winners, that's all they want, you know?

Somebody who will sell, preferably somebody who's got a second novel after the first, and eventually you do it.

Otherwise, you don't publish, you know?

You write the stuff, you distribute it to your friends, make you a little magazine and publish your own.

If it's any good, it'll get there anyway.

Everybody says, you know, vanity press is a terrible thing, and it's true, it is.

On the other hand, you know, Proust and Gide, you know, got out that way.

It's not absolutely impossible.

In fact, most of the great literature of the '20s and '30s that we know about came from vanity press, in effective vanity press, people publishing their friends in Paris.

- I would, in particular with "Nickel Mountain", I'd kind of like to know how important you feel having the main character in the story as a good guy, or, you know, maybe slightly above average.

- Well, I don't know if he's above average, particularly.

I think the character in "Nickel Mountain" is pretty much average, you know, New York state, rural kind of person.

Considerable intelligence, you know, not higher than 125 IQ or something like that, but, you know, healthy intelligence.

And he reads papers, he only reads the kind of paper that you get in a Catskill town, which means it's Republican and it's pretty short news and everything's got the local angle and so on.

But I do think that the central character in a novel has to be, in some sense, a good guy.

It may be that he's dead wrong, may be that he's practically Jesus, whatever.

In which case, I mean, not dead wrong, but it seems to me that we care about characters.

I mean, you feel concerned about characters and therefore you feel concerned about the plot and the setting and the theme, everything else.

I think that the most important thing in fiction is character.

I think that setting exists so that a character's got someplace to stand and something to pick up and throw, or something to drink or to eat.

Setting is just, you know, to help the character around.

In fact, I think that setting characterizes.

I think you choose the setting so that we'll get a clearer picture of the character.

Like, you know some friend in university and you know him inside out, you know very well.

And then you see, you know, the person takes you home with him or her and you see that person's parents' living room and you say, aha, you know?

That's what I was missing, you know?

Setting works that way.

Setting works for character and is a wonderful thing.

Plot, as far as I'm concerned, exists only so the character can figure out who he is, you know?

I mean, a character doesn't know who he is until he sees what he does.

He can talk and talk and talk.

In fact, he may do nothing but talk, in which case that's what he is.

But everything goes for character.

And of course, the real reason that character is so important, because I said yesterday and I'll say again, that the reason we care a lot about literature and the reason that some of us get so angry at bad literature or mediocre or imitation literature, is that while we're interested in the individual, particular person, very interested, you know?

Because we're interested in human beings, interested in how people feel and think and so on.

We have, in us, in other words, an immense capacity for love and understanding.

We're also interested in how mankind, humankind is.

We're interested in what is repeatable in this problem.

You know, Captain Ahab is interesting because he's a kind of crazy maniac of a special curious way.

But also Captain Ahab cares about something, although he cares about it crazily, we all wanna know, what is the truth?

I mean, the real truth behind the mask, right?

It's a repeatable question.

It seems to me that what happens when you have a really fine character, is that you get not only a sense of that kind of person in that kind of town, but yourself and everybody around you.

And see, finally we get a kind of control of the universe, a kind of fearlessness from having understood other people.

I have a theory that the only reason human beings ever think, and in a perfect world, there would be no thought whatsoever, but we think because something goes wrong, you know?

The intellect is just a silly little machine, you know?

On a computer, it's about that big, you know?

All the rest is memory bank.

The intellect is just there for emergencies.

You know, like a bull is coming at you and you have to, you know, and the fence is that far and the bull is that far, and he's coming at this speed and that's when you turn on the intellect.

At any other time, you just go at the bull, you know?

Or you just go whatever.

- From Columbia, South Carolina, this is Tom Wolfe thanking you for joining us for the University of South Carolina "Writer's Workshop".

(gentle music) (dramatic music)