Gardner

Aping another writer’s style is foolish, but the noblest originality is not stylistic but visionary and intellectual; the writer’s accurate presentation of what he, himself, has seen, heard, thought, and felt.

Such a novelist may hate nearly all of humanity, as Celine does, or large groups of people, as does Nabokov. What counts in this case is not that we believe the private vision to be right but that we are so convinced by and interested in the person who does the seeing that we are willing to follow him around.

He must learn … to distinguish the subtlest differences between the speech and feeling of his various characters, himself as impartial and detached as God, giving all human beings their due and acknowledging their frailties. Insofar as he pretends not to private vision but to omniscience, he cannot as a rule, love some of his characters and despise others.

No one readily admits that his hatreds are irrational. The stubborn conviction that one is right to spurn most kinds of people can itself be a stymieing force. Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.

…studying his characters’ most trivial gestures in the imagined scene to discover exactly where the scene must go next …

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.

since art does not afford the testable certainties of geometry or physics.

"you aren't" or the fairly more assertive "you're not."

Or the writer may slide into alcoholism, the number one occupational hazard of the trade.

More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.

It's hard to live down one's shoddy publications, and it's hard to scrap cheap techniques once they've worked. It's like trying to stop cheating at marriage or golf.

Paraphrase Addendum:

Detail is the life blood of fiction; show, don't tell; who are our characters and what do they do; don't manipulate fiction and bully characters into actions unnatural to them; don't interrupt the action to preach; read to see how things are done, how I would do them differently and why & if it would be better; plot is not meant to be a series of surprises but an increasingly moving series of recognitions or moments of understanding; good fiction does not deal in codes of conduct. It affirms responsible humanness; tell stories in terms of dilemma, suffering and choice; be the servant of the story.

Let no one tell you that all good writers eventually get published.

... some [fiction] is rejected because it was sent to the wrong kind of publisher, or because it never got past the slush-pile reader, who's tired and maybe not too bright, or because the publisher has a backlog, or because the editor cannot stand stories about cows ... One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception—at least some of the time—incompetent or crazy ... It is useful, in short, for young writers always to think of editors as limited people, though if possible one should treat them politely.

This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer's process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things—sees them clearly—and in the act of wondering what they will do next, he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or vision becoming more and more lucid, until reality, by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead.

Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer wrote from "inspiration," or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect ... most stories and novels have at least moments of the real thing, some exactly right gesture or startlingly apt metaphor, some brief passage describing wallpaper of the movement of a cat, a passage that somehow shines or throbs as nothing around it does, some fictional moment that, as we say, "comes alive." It is this experience of seeing something one has written come alive—literally, not metaphorically, a character or scene daemonically entering the world by its own strange power, so that the writer feels not the creator but only the instrument, or conjurer, the priest who stumbled onto the magic spell—it is this experience of tapping some magic source that makes the writer an addict, wiling to give up almost anything for his art ...

... the fundamental concepts of fiction—how one event must cause another ... ; how characters' motives must be shown dramatically, not just talked about; how setting, character, and action must interpenetrate, each supporting and infusing the others; how plot must have rhythm, so that in some way it builds in intensity toward an emotional high point; how the narrative must have design, a firm structure that gives every part value but does not vulgarly call attention to itself; how style, plot, and meaning must finally be all one ... a story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn't turn something ...