Two for One: Great Companion Volumes on Writing
Such
Stuff as Dreams: the Psychology of Fiction, by Keith Oatley
Wiley-Blackwell 2011
West Sussex, United Kingdom
Classic book on the subject of
writing:
The
Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner
Alfred A. Knopf, 1984
New York and Toronto, Simultaneously
Reviewed by Debrah Lechner
Keith Oatley’s Such Stuff as Dreams begins with Chapter 1, Fiction as Dream:
Models, World-Building, Simulation, and it takes as its inspiration the
work of Shakespeare. He cites in particular Shakespeare’s A Mid-Summer’s Night Dream, in which the playwright asks the
audience to imagine a world that might exist “as if in a dream:” to “suspend
disbelief,” that famous, awkward phrase used to avoid using the simple word
“believe.” It’s the difference between a child and an adult: children believe a
tale, adults suspend disbelief. But Oatley asserts that for a work of fiction
to be successful it must be deeply believed, even when written for adults, and
his predecessor, John Gardner, would agree. In fact, these two volumes are in
perfect harmony and both should be on a writer’s bookshelf.
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner gives no indication of why he
insists that a work of fiction must function as “an unbroken dream” except his
own experience and opinion. In Chapter 2, Basic Skills, Genre, and Fiction
as a Dream, Gardner insists that this dream must not be broken by
inconsistencies in plot, characterization, style or any element that tends to
wake us up from the story’s reality. Regardless of the genre of the story, he
sees the ordinary waking reality that we all experience as the ground the
reality of story is sown in, and from which it grows, just as the dreams we
have in sleep are. At the end of the chapter he says, “Somehow the fictional
dream persuades us that it’s a clear, sharp, edited version of the dream all around us.” Gardner discusses
Shakespeare several times as well, the first time on page 5 and 6, when in
discussing Hamlet and how that plot
progresses, he says, “the center of every Shakespearean play, as of all great
literature, is character.”
Keith Oatley would certainly agree
with that, and Such Stuff as Dreams
delves into character and its effect on fiction expansively. Research into how
human beings express character is presented throughout the book: in Chapter 2, The
Space-in-Between: Models, World-building, and Simulation, he discusses first
how story telling has its roots in childhood play, and then visits Hamlet, as Gardner did, and shows how
metaphor and metonymy (the way sentences are arranged) turn the mapping of
Denmark into a poetic description of confinement. “Models, world-building, and
simulation” are not terms that would have been familiar to Gardner in literature
as they are now, but he would have intuited their meaning immediately. They are
welcome modern iterations of ideas Gardner was well-acquainted with.
Oatley goes much farther in his
exploration of the human psyche and story telling. He cites ancient examples
and modern studies of the potency of the imagination in building worlds, both
real and less real, and in the process covers icharacter, arc, setting and the
act of writing, as books on writing necessarily do. Oatley’s writing on these subjects
is scholarly and he has no particular method to advocate, whereas in all
probability it never occurred to Gardner to include many scholarly sources
aside from his own academic experience. His focus is more on practical
applications, and he is rigorous in his demands on new writers to the point of
being more than a little intimidating, even discouraging.
To be challenged is a good thing, though.To
take the time to think through what might be happening in your brain and the
brain of your readers through your fiction is also a very good thing. Both
books are chock-full of ideas that you will find necessary in your thinking as
soon as you are introduced to them.
A particularly interesting section
of Oatley’s Such Stuff as Dreams covers
memory, and its extraordinarily important effect on story-telling, whether the
intent is to fictionalize or to tell the truth.
Gardner, concentrating on form, does
not have a particular section that deals with memory. But it is worth noting
his observation on Truman Capote’s In
Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The
Executioner’s Song. Both books were based on actual events. “Of course, the
fact that the story is true does not relieve the novelist of the responsibility
of making the characters and events convincing,” Gardner wrote.
Both Oatley’s and Gardner’s book on writing
fiction reverberate into the world of non-fiction and creative non-fiction, a
can of worms that need not be opened here, except to repeat that these books
should be read by all writers.
It is also worth noting that
Oatley’s Such Stuff as Dreams has two
extraordinarily valuable sections of endnotes and bibliography, as well as an
index.
Gardner’s Art of Fiction includes a section of exercises, and also has an
index.
John Gardner was an academic scholar
and critic who wrote, among others, the imaginative works Grendel and October Light.
Keith Oatley is a Professor Emeritus
at the University of Toronto, and has written three works of fiction, winning
the 1994 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel.