“Seizing Whatever Swims Close”: Gardner on the Creative Process

“Out of the artist’s imagination, as out of nature’s inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another.  The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net.  This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material.  This shimmering mess of loves and hates – fishing trips taken long ago with Uncle Ralph, a 1940 green Chevrolet, a war, a vague sense of what makes a novel, a symphony, a photograph – this is the clay the artist must shape into an object worthy of our attention; that is, our tears, our laughter, our thought.”

– John Gardner