A review by milktoast
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner

4.0

I typically walk away from books about writing with a few new tips or tricks and maybe a new idea. This book is very different. As the title reflects, it explores fiction as both craft and art. At first I worried that Gardner was kind of pretentious--his style is certainly very academic. But he managed to fuse together solid writing advice with interesting theory in a way that challenged me to think about how I approach writing (without making me feel like I had to write like ~*the classics*~). He uses classic lit for his examples, and sometimes I was annoyed by his assumption that his reader would be familiar. I'm fairly well read in the classics, but I haven't read everything dude.

I've seen people say that this book is only for those who write literary fiction, but I disagree and I think Gardner would too. Regardless of your genre, if you are interested in advancing your writing as craft and art, this is a good read. I've been working on the exercises at the end of the book and some of them are hard!