Having read the “how to” write fiction works of such esteemed writers as Janet Burroway, John Gardiner, Lagos Egri, Francine Prose, Jane Smiley, Ambrose Bierce, and Syd Field, among numerous others, I have reached the conclusion, as William Golden had writing in his book on Hollywood “Adventures in the Screen Trade, ” that no one knows anything. Not a single thing as to what makes fiction work.

Ideas, theories, postulations, conventions, appeals to historical evidence, methods, treatises, maxims, these are all bunk. What worked for Anton Chekov did not work for Fyodor Dostoevsky. When we marvel at a sentence by Marilynne Robinson, it is not the same aesthetic at play in W.G. Sebald. What makes a Dickens plot so compelling is not what makes a story by Hemingway work. There are different aesthetic principles at work, different modes of organization, different tools, and I hate to say it, “tricks.” But tricks they are, and I don’t mean that pejoratively, because writers are essentially craftsmen, using the tools and tricks of trope, grammar, syntax, sentence variation, paragraph structure and story organization, and a whole mess of other stuff to reach beyond the artistic boundaries of the past and forge a new way of doing things, making their novelistic works “novel.”

Novel, not novelties. The distinction is important. We as writers are not engaged, and should not be engaged, in cleverness, or trickiness, or quirkiness for it’s own sake, reducing things to cause and effect. When we reduce, we distort, we engage in cliche and melodrama. We create sentimentalities and thus difficult/complex characters become simple statements of logical reasoning and temporality. Why did the father drink so heavily and beat his children, oh, because of such and such event or series of experiences in his childhood. Why did the waitress steal from her boss, oh, because she was poor and needed the money for an abortion. Why did that kid shoot you his school, oh, it was a lack of love in the home, or structure, or too many video games. Such one to one relations are silly and abject. But I digress.

No one knows anything. Not a goddamned thing. Except the writer who by his ingenuity and artistic sensitivity, who by his sheer force of will and madness and singular vision van reach into the hearts of people and crush and terrify and ennoble and exult them, can blaze a new path forward by making, as the self-spoken postman said to Pablo Neruda in the wonderful movie Il Postino, “Maestro, make it new.”

But what do I know? What is new is old and what was in vogue yesterday is not in favor today. What do I know except that I know nothing, not a goddamned thing, and perhaps that’s a way forward to making things new.