A review by showell
On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner

4.0

I very much enjoyed this book. And found it quite encouraging. Many books on writing have the ironic effect of making me never want to write again (which is why I avoid them in general unless I have a specific question on craft). This one didn't. I do wish, though, that he used more women writers in his examples. Women don't show up at all in his lists of folks to read/emulate until at least one third of the way into the book, and even then there are only a couple of them, while men are everywhere. This, paired with his use of "he", which he feels self conscious enough about to explicitly justify, made me wonder if he thought women could write at all.