Columnist Cites Lies! Lies! Lies! by John C. Gardner '55

January 6, 2004

January 6, 2004, Greencastle, Ind. - "For writers, a daybook is a practice field, a rehearsal hall, a training ground, a laboratory for experiments with language and form, a place to try and fail and try again," writes Chip Scanlan, a writing coach who pens a question-and-answer column at the Poynter Institute's Web site. "A handwritten journal kept in the early 1950s by a nineteen-year old sophomore at DePauw University 'is the workshop in which John Gardner teaches himself the craft that will make him one of the great writer-teachers of his time,' Thomas Gavin writes in his introduction to Lies! Lies! Lies!: A College Journal of John Gardner, published in a fascimile edition by the University of Rochester Libaries."

Scanlan, answering a query about daybooks, continues, "'With the journal shaping his discipline, Gardner as a teacher is his own best student,' writes Gavin. 'He writes character sketches, scenes, poems, parodies, polemics arguing with critics and teachers —- then tests and questions his own words (he calls the journal Lies! Lies! Lies! to remind himself that his opinions are provisional). Again and again he formulates strategies that he will incarnate in novels… The journal, then, gives its writer a chance to discover what works and what doesn't.'"

You can read the complete item online by clicking here.

Learn more about John C. Gardner -- a member of DePauw's Class of 1955, who also authored On Becoming a Novelist, The Art of Fiction, and On Moral Fiction -- here, here and here.

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