On Becoming a Novelist

| 4.26 | 3,073 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Andrew Cowan, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #23 in Fiction Writing, Ranked #49 in Creative Writing — see more rankings.

On Becoming a Novelist contains the wisdom accumulated during John Gardner's distinguished twenty-year career as a fiction writer and creative writing teacher. With elegance, humor, and sophistication, Gardner describes the life of a working novelist; warns what needs to be guarded against, both from within the writer and from without; and predicts what the writer can reasonably expect and what, in general, he or she cannot. "For a certain kind of person," Gardner writes, "nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist." But no other vocation, he is quick to add, is... more
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Andrew Cowan This is another one of the classics. He was quite a successful novelist in the States, but possibly an even more successful teacher of creative writing. The short story writer and poet Raymond Carver, for instance, was one of his students. And he died young in a motorcycle accident when he was 49. There are two classic works by him. One is this book, On Becoming a Novelist, and the other is The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. They were both put together from his teaching notes after he died. (Source)

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