On Reading and Writing Fiction: Thoughts of an Inveterate Writer of Non-Fiction (Part 2)

Howard Gardner © 2024

Part 2: On Writing Fiction

In my previous essay, I reflected on my reading of fiction—both lifelong and in recent times; what I feel prepared to read and enjoy, as well as what poses greater challenges. Here, I turn my attention to a challenging puzzle: Why—while I write almost daily on a range of topics—haven’t I been attracted to the writing of fiction?

Let me begin with a cognitive approach—the approach to mind that I have always found easiest and most comfortable to assume. The writing of fiction calls upon creative capacities—short stories, novels, plays, even poems. None of these genres has ever beckoned me. It’s not surprising that I have not been tempted to paint, draw, dance—I lack the requisite intelligences.

But if one takes the theory of multiple intelligences seriously, I certainly have the potential to compose music. Music is extremely important in my life. I’ve always loved music; I play the piano almost every day, and—to the annoyance of some!—listen to music throughout the day and far into the night. Yet, even in the art form of music, I have never been tempted to compose. Indeed, I located a short score that I recorded when I was 7-8—and that’s the last, and indeed, the only evidence I’ve found for any inclination to create music.

If I was going to be creative in any area, it should have been writing—literature, stories, plays, perhaps even poems. But except for writing ditties—which I attempt with at best modest success—I have no impulse to do. So, why not? Some possible explanations:

The Reading Around my Childhood Home

Because of the rise of the Nazis, my German-born Jewish parents were denied a higher education. And once they were able to come to America, where they dealt with a pile of real-life challenges, they did not have much time to read books. But my father did set aside some time to read—almost entirely histories and biographies. These were shelved or strewn around the house. I followed his example, and by the time I was ten or eleven, I was already scanning The New York Times—and monitoring the daily news programs. So, we might say that my home was largely devoid of fictional reading and writing.

My reading as a young person was quite scattered. While, in my father’s footsteps, I absorbed and emulated his interests in history and biography, I certainly read the stories that boys (and perhaps girls) read in school and in magazines—and once we began to read serious literature in secondary school, I enjoyed the classics in the curriculum—Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Cather, Longfellow, Dickinson—and, by the time of college, I was also reading the novels of the day—Updike, Roth, Baldwin. In those days I don’t think that I made a sharp distinction between fiction and nonfiction, or even between novels, short stories, and poetry—I read what was assigned, what was talked about, or what was displayed in the windows of bookstores.

Was I ever—or even—tempted to write fiction?

The short answer: barely, hardly.

At both of the secondary schools that I attended, I wrote for the school paper—and since short stories were encouraged, I wrote a few. Through (good) luck, I recently found a story that I had written for the high school newspaper when I was sixteen. At best, it’s serviceable—it’s attached here, and you can judge for yourself. (The topic is of interest—see below.) But as soon as I reached a more exalted position as editor of The Opinator, I focused on editorials and news stories, and did not feel the slightest temptation to flex or develop any fiction muscles, with one notable exception:

When I had completed college— four years where my writing had been consumed almost entirely by the authoring of required course papers—I was awarded a year in which I could do pretty much what I wanted. I enjoyed “the life” in London (including numerous plays, see Part 1); I prepared for my wedding to Judy Krieger; and I wrote a novel—1200 scribbled pages (there were no word processing programs then). The novel was no good, I knew it was no good, since I did not want to “schlepp” it with me back from Europe to the US. I left it in Paris with my cousin Sabine —and she has informed me that it has gone the way of all flesh. Probably fortunately!

So clearly, I did not have a well-developed creative muscle in any medium—not even in language, which has clearly been important to me. But are there other, deeper reasons? Perhaps indeed, and maybe likely!

As detailed in several autobiographical writings (see Gardner, 2020), I had an extremely protected childhood. Because my parents had lost their country as well as their only son (a brother, killed in a freak sleigh-riding accident when my mother was pregnant with me), they not only kept me away from any physical exercise; they also did not discuss the painful incidents in their lives. Indeed, I only found out about my deceased brother through a chance discovery of old newspaper clippings; and I only learned about the Holocaust when I was older. (Surprising note: Until the 1960s, when I was already off to college, the Holocaust was not much discussed in the United States). In a word, many areas were forbidden or, to use the term of my childhood, “verboten.”

Of course, that could have led to an opposite reaction—fascination by fiction, a desire to add to it, days and nights of daydreams and nightmares. That did not happen in my case. But there is a more positive narrative. When I was a teenager, my uncle Fred (Fritz)—whose life was far more adventurous than that of my nuclear family—presented me with a psychology textbook. I had hardly heard of psychology, but I was fascinated by the existence of a field that was devoted to an understanding of the human mind. Presciently, Fritz sensed my interest in that sphere. I should add that Fritz was a bibliophile and book collector; and he even read and wrote critiques of my articles in The Opinator.

Not surprisingly, when I went to college, I began to explore history—my natural area of interest, curiosity, and expertise—but also the social sciences, and particularly the role therein of psychology. At first, because I was attracted to his historical and biographical writings, I became an admirer and fan of the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson and was fortunate to have him as a tutor for two years. At the time, I thought I might have followed in his footsteps—becoming a psychiatrist, psychologist, or some kind of clinician.

But weeks after graduating from college, as soon as I began to work with the psychologist Jerome Bruner, I came to realize that my deeper interests were in cognition—how thinking develops and breaks down, how it has been employed and deployed by individuals at different times and in different places. And indeed, in my pile of books and articles about “mind,” the focus has been largely on cognition—in a much broader sense than that embraced by most psychologists—to encompass the arts, for example, and the creation of large-scale works, not just answers to a short-answer test or behavior in controlled lab conditions.

One more finger on the literary scale: Because of various problems in vision (color blindness, prosopagnosia, lack of binocular vision and hence lack of depth perception), I live in a world that is overwhelmingly conceptual and linguistic, rather than sensory or imagistic. If I dream, I seldom remember my dreams and virtually never their visual features—if any! So much of good writing involves a recreation of the physical world in words—I have the words (and perhaps the concepts), but not the images.

So much for my own reflections on fiction-apraxia, a clinical term that I’ve just created. But what of other persons, who don’t have my (perhaps lamentable) combination of a repressed personal history and significant sensory limitations? Why are they not attracted to the writing of fiction? Here, with her (reluctant) permission, I am using my wife Ellen Winner as an example. She is a wonderful writer—she loves fiction and reads it all the time (while my mind is largely buried these days in historical, biographical, and social scientific works), and she has had a fascinating—and equally challenging—family life. While I incline toward the repression of difficult chapters in my personal life, Ellen has explored those in her life in great detail. She is also an expert on artistic creation: author of the classic text, Invented Worlds, and the path- breaking How Art Works. Like mine, her family also saw many deaths and radical dislocations as a result of the Holocaust.

To put words in her mouth: While Ellen loves to read about individuals and scenes that resemble those of her own life, she does not have the desire to recreate them—with suitable disguise—in writings of her own. At the very least, there is no great pull in that direction—and perhaps also a desire not to cause pain to others in her family or her circle…or to relive episodes that were painful to her. It’s also a relief to me personally—because she, along with our children and grandchildren, would presumably have a field day in creating a fictional “Hubert Graham.”

The Pull to Fiction in Later Life

I began this pair of essays with a reflection on the writing lives of two friends from early in life. While I did not reflect on personal motivations on the part of Max Byrd or Mark Harris, I venture that there were some. But I have also observed other friends of a lifetime who only began to write fiction—or even to think about writing fiction—in their later years. My analysis of their motivation—they have observed and lived through some dramatic, and perhaps traumatic, personal situations. They don’t have the “stomach” or the “chutzpah” to write about these literally—and so they are using the vehicle of “invented worlds” to deal with these through enigmas and challenges.

A Personal Analogy

After leading a research enterprise for many years, I recently decided to move to the sidelines. I think that this was the right decision—and yet at times, I find myself second-guessing the behaviors and the decisions of my successors. Properly, I have kept my mouth shut and my pen (and my increasingly arthritic fingers) still. But if I had the urge, I might be tempted to write about it…in fiction. But that’s for another life—perhaps one left and written about by “Hubert Graham I” or “Hubert Graham II.”

Another life course

In rolling up my sleeves to write this essay, I consulted a book known from 55 years ago, Anne Roe’s The Making of Scientist. Roe did careful case studies of 60 major scientists—20 each from physical sciences, biological sciences, and social sciences. A fascinating and unexpected finding: Several of the psychologists had begun as writers of novels (from my day, I think of my elders at Harvard, B. F. Skinner and Roger Brown); but they found that they could not understand others sufficiently via the route of fiction,  and so they turned to another window on the life of the mind—observations, experiments, building of theories.

More generally, I think that those of us who are drawn to the various sciences have as a principal motivation “figuring out how things actually work.” Rather than inventing worlds, we seek to uncover them. Perhaps at a deeper level or at a different angle, we share properties with those who write novels, plays, or poems—but on the surface we seek (perhaps prosaic) explanations rather than imaginative creations.

Final Provocative Thought

In two essays, I have reflected both on my own proclivities for reading and for writing, as well as those that may explain my hesitation to write fiction, to invent worlds. As the psychologist in me asserts “Howard, you are an N-of-1!” I hope that some of you who have made your way through these personal reflections and speculations will be motivated to analyze your own relation to fiction—and to share your conclusions—whether in essay form, as I have, or in an appropriate literary genre—including the comment section of these essays.

SELECTED REFERENCES

Gardner, H. (2020). A synthesizing mind. MIT Press.

Roe, A. (1973). The making of a scientist. Greenwood Press.

Winner, E. (1982). Invented worlds: The psychology of the arts. Harvard University Press.

Winner, E. (2018). How art works: A psychological exploration. Oxford University Press.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For comments on earlier versions of this blog series, I am very grateful to Mark Harris, Max Byrd, Ellen Winner, Shinri Furuzawa, and Annie Stachura.