Ask some authors and they’ll tell you there is no such thing as writer’s block, it’s merely an excuse for laziness. Others will tell you it’s a constant, very real, struggle.
Consider the long-standing popularity of Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” a self-help book geared toward reigniting an author’s creative energy, and it would appear more people are inclined to side with the sufferers. For Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley, it was never an issue until September 2001.
The eclectic author has written 11 novels, covering a gamut from historical fiction (“The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton”) to modern-day suspense (“Duplicate Keys”) and satirical comedy (“Moo”). Perhaps it was her refusal to be pigeonholed into any one genre that always kept her creative juices flowing. Then, two-thirds of the way through completing “Good Faith,” a cautionary tale about greed in the 1980s, her fingers faltered. Words would not come. The World Trade Center had just been bombed in New York, and fear was palpable everywhere.
“The overwhelming pall of grief and fear and odor and loss reached us more or less abstractly. Unlike New Yorkers, we could turn it off and get back to work, or so it seemed. But perhaps I was sensitive to something other than events – to a collective unconscious reaction to those events that I sensed in the world around me?”
Smiley hypothesized for a time that she would remain scattered until the collective unconscious “pulled itself together and raised itself up and put fear aside.” Upon further analysis she realized the blockage actually lay within her.
“The problem with the novel was not outside myself, or even in my link to human consciousness.”
But what was it then? As she moved tenuously forward, trying to discover the true nature of her stalled inspiration, she wondered, “if novel-writing had its own natural life span and without knowing it, I had outlived the life span of my novel-writing career.”
Did she simply have nothing else to say? No more important truths to communicate? Hardly. In actuality, the answer was much simpler and less universally profound.
Jane Smiley feared her book wasn’t good enough.
“One day I waited for inspiration, got some, went off in a completely new direction, then had some thoughts the next day and tried something new. This was a symptom, indeed, a symptom that I didn’t know what in the world I was doing, and it was way too late in the game for that. My heart sank. No, my flesh turned to ice. No, my eyes popped out of my head. No, my stomach churned. No, all I did was close the file on my computer and walk away. But that was very bad. I decided to read a hundred novels. This book is the fruit of that course.”
In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,” Smiley uses her literary reading list to define what the novel is. Classic authors such as Dickens, Woolf, Tolstoy and Cervantes serve as her instructors. Their work is studied, compared and contrasted to each other and others as Smiley deconstructs the novel as a physical form. With great intellect, and no little enthusiasm, she peers into the origin, psychology, morality, art and history of the novel.
Following her thorough definition of the novel are two chapters that offer insightful tutelage for authors wanting to write their own books. “The ultimate fact about novel-writing is that you can never control whether your writing efforts will be successful, but you can control whether they will be enjoyable or satisfying.”
Smiley’s sensitive and practical advice addresses such things as inspiration, discipline and ritual and editing your first draft. Finally, she wraps her journey with “Chapter Twelve, Good Faith: A Case History.” In case you’re wondering, she did, indeed, complete the novel. The rough draft arrived on her editor’s desk 17 days past deadline, wrapped in worry. Smiley didn’t expect her editor to like it, but to her astonishment, she did.
Four rewrites later the book went into production and Smiley still wasn’t satisfied with her efforts. How could other people like it more than she did? In the end, she learned that “while it owed its existence to my effort and will, it did not owe its nature to my wishes or choices.”
To date, the book still stands alone in her mind, different and apart from her other work. “It is still the one that happened to surprise me, so I owe it some loyalty. It has been fertile too – spawning this book and, through this book, my next novel, which is just beginning to appear in the distance.”
Finally, the last half of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel” is dedicated to the 100 novels, plus one (a chick-lit afterthought), that Smiley read. “My list is not and was never intended to be a ‘Hundred Greatest,’ only a list of individual novels that would illuminate the whole concept of the novel – and almost any list of a hundred serious novels would illuminate that concept.”
After reading each book she wrote a mini-essay detailing her thoughts about the author and the story. Her critiques are shrewd, artful and unflinching, much like the book they inspired.
For the literati, Smiley’s latest is sure to inspire delicious debate; for the more pragmatic reader this book is certain to excite interest in undiscovered works and for authors. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel” will elicit empathetic pangs of understanding while also instigating a broader view of the novel as a living, breathing entity.
Smiley says she believes “all novels, no matter where they are set, fall silent and disappear when the covers are closed.”
About this, she is wrong. There are a rare few novels, and some nonfiction books like “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,” that continue to whisper their profundities long after the last page is turned.
Terri Clark is a Colorado freelance writer.
