The pessimism about rewards is marbled throughout the book. He recommends not giving up your day job, but trying to get a day job that leaves you time for the copious amount of time it takes to write and polish a novel. He recommends a teaching job at a university where you don’t have to do more than a few courses, you put in a perfunctory amount of time at them, and devote your free time to ‘the work.’ (That’s both the verb and the noun.) 

The two products collided in my mind on the drive back from the movies. I watched, thinking some of Gardner’s “vivid dream.” A movie is nothing if not that. You can still get kicked out of the illusion; if you’re going along just fine and all of a sudden something seems unlikely, you squirm in your seat. It’s a different sort of squirm than you do when someone is wounded or when you’re trying to keep your companion from seeing that you are weeping. If the squirms of disbelief are too frequent, you might walk out into the sunlight and shake your head at the waste of time and money. “Hunger Games” was not full of squirms that sort, and had a few of the other sort. Later, though, pondering the plot line we swallowed, I got to wondering… what would John Gardner have thought of this book? Would he have picked it up, seen that it was primarily present tense, sometimes present continuous, somewhat breezily written in the character’s sarcastic first person voice, and put it down as I did? There’s no knowing, of course. He complained that there were many books that he thought were good enough (merely) for publication, but not good enough to meet his standard of ‘moral art.’ 

I’m a bit vague on this point. I understood Gardner’s points about keeping the vivid dream from jarring interruptions for whatever reasons. I understood the parts about what Ives calls ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ Write it right. Read it over and over, making revisions until it does not disappoint you. I understand, though not enough to apply them consistently yet in composing or editing, the necessity of getting characters to live and breathe, to have them drive the plot, and to plunge in at the crisis point without getting bogged down up front in excessive backstory. What I don’t understand is why we can’t specifically attempt to appeal to the large majority of people who buy books (or watch movies made from the plots and characters of books). Gardner speaks of generosity and of a manner of respect for the reader. He specifically mentions plots that will never work, and plots that illustrate his idea of a moral payoff. I am distorting and coarsening his idea because I want to know how to become a best-selling novelist. This is mentioned by Gardner. He says that among the reasons writers felt called upon to write novels, among them is the desire to make money. John Gardner never wrote a best-seller. His view on the topic is that of the fine artist, and as we know, that is not what drives the American public, either in Gardner’s time or ours. If anything, the culture has coarsened since the 80’s when Gardner tragically died. 

I don’t see why the two goals can’t be made to line up. In fact, I don’t see why art is exclusive from popular success. Perhaps it’s because I grew up with the Beatles. I just can’t get it into my head so that it sticks that the public is unable to appreciate that which is good. I like Gardner’s “Mickelsson’s Ghosts” very much; admire it, in fact. But the novel is hard going. Its conflict is all wrapped up in what it is to be an academic, and that alone deprives it of a wide audience. “Hunger Games,” on the other hand, is about things everyone understands: corrupt, abusive and manipulative government, the necessities of poverty, human nature as it pertains to killing and survival, and, of course, since it’s a genre ‘young adult’ piece, the awkwardnesses and  allegiances of youth. These are innately appealing themes. All you have to do is work the material right (and this is where Gardner and others that know how to tell stories come in handy), and you have a sellable book that people will buy. Try to tell another sort of story, with subjects not appealing to many, or occluded by settings alien and repellant, and you are going to be needing and keeping that day job.

So I’ll keep Gardner’s advice about craft close to heart. When casting about for the subject matter for my next attempt at fiction, I’ll think of Suzanne Collins. YA will not be my genre, I suspect. I lean towards more general topics. Maybe that’s not true. I know about the ballet schools first hand. That’s YA all the way. In any case, I want to write stories. Long, short, I don’t care. Most importantly, I want to tell stories people want to read. John Lennon, how did you do it? You were a story teller! Your characters got no reply, remembered places, crawled off to sleep in the bath, and even counted up the holes in Blackburn Lancashire. It was not a small audience that you had. Novels and pop songs are not the same, of course. Themes, characters, and crises are shared by all forms of story telling. It is in the choice of these that I think the best-seller lies. Can it be done deliberately? Or is it luck and magic?

PS: My one quibble with the “Hunger Games” plot was that ’74th annual Hunger Games” figure. When a totalitarian regime is as televised and exposed as this one is, a rebellion will not take that long to develop. It just won’t. I’m the only one jarred by this, perhaps. And it is not in the way of sales. You can make such mistakes and prevail. But I’d want to fix it before galleys if it were me. It’s not me. So far.