Background Image

...

Sometimes, A Novel Is Like A Train: The First Chapter Is A Comfortable Seat In An Attractive Carriage, And The Narrative Speeds Up. But There Are Other Sorts Of Trains, And Other Sorts Of Novels. They Rush By In The Dark; Passengers Framed In The Lighted Windows Are Smiling And Enjoying Themselves.

-Jane Smiley

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Sometimes, A Novel Is

Jane Smiley

...

Sometimes, A Novel Is Like A Train: The First Chapter Is A Comfortable Seat In An Attractive Carriage, And The Narrative Speeds Up. But There Are Other Sorts Of Trains, And Other Sorts Of Novels. They Rush By In The Dark; Passengers Framed In The Lighted Windows Are Smiling And Enjoying Themselves.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Jane Smiley

The Fact Is That The Same Sequence Of Days Can Arrange Themselves Into A Number Of Different Stories.

'ape House' Is An Ambitious Novel In Several Ways, For Which It Is To Be Admired, And It Is Certainly An Easy Read, But Because Gruen Is Not Quite Prepared For The Philosophical Implications Of Her Subject, It Is Not As Deeply Involving Emotionally Or As Interesting Thematically As It Could Be.

Your Sons Weren't Made To Like You. That's What Grandchildren Are For.

When I Came Home For The Summer After My First Year Of College, I Told My Mother That My Best Friend And I Were Driving To California. She Laughed Out Loud - 2,000 Miles In A What? Well, My Best Friend Had An Old Chevy. What Could Go Wrong?

Oh, That Sound? I'm In The Hot Tub, Reading A Novel.

In The Traditional Urban Novel, There Is Only Survival Or Not. The Suburban Idea, The Conformist Idea, That Agony Can Be Seen To And Cured By Doctors Or Psychoanalysis Or Self-knowledge Is Nowhere To Be Found In The City. Talking Is A Way Of Life, But It Is Not A Cure. Same With Religion.

There Can Never Be Such A Thing As A Free Market, Because It Is Human Nature To Cheat, Monopolize, And Buy Off Others So As To Corner The Market.

One Of The Profound Effects Of Economics In Our Day Is That The People With The Money And The Power Have Embraced The Guilt-free, External-less, Everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end Philosophy Of Economics In Order To Justify Their Own Evil Works. And The Economists, For The Most Part, Have Sucked Up To That Money.

Well, In Fact Everybody - Everybody - In The Entire Nation Has Enough Stuff In Their Life To Write About That's Interesting That They Could Write Their Autobiography. And In The End That's Why I Find People Interesting.

You Know What Getting Married Is? It's Agreeing To Taking This Person Who Right Now Is At The Top Of His Form, Full Of Hopes And Ideas, Feeling Good, Looking Good, Wildly Interested In You Because You're The Same Way, And Sticking By Him While He Slowly Disintegrates. And He Does The Same For You. You're His Responsibility Now And He's Yours. If No One Else Will Take Care Of Him, You Will. If Everyone Else Rejects You, He Won't. What Do You Think Love Is? Going To Bed All The Time?

I Have Reared, Or Helped To Rear, Five Children And The Scariest Bit, Bar None, Is The Learning To Drive Part. It Has Filled Me With Anxiety Not Only About The Children, But Also About My Former Self And My Friends.

There Is Something I Have Noticed About Desire, That It Opens The Eyes And Strikes Them Blind At The Same Time.

In Every Society, The Artists Will Be The Ones Who Set Themselves Up As Contrary To Whatever The Society Expects.

But What Truly Horsey Girls Discover In The End Is That Boyfriends, Husbands, Children, And Careers Are The Substitute-for Horses

The One Thing ... Maybe No Family Could Tolerate Was Things Coming Out Into The Open.

Is Human Nature Basically Good Or Evil? No Economist Can Embark Upon His Profession Without Considering This Question, And Yet They All Seem To. And They All Seem To Think Human Nature Is Basically Good, Or They Wouldn't Be Surprised By The Effects Of Deregulation.

How Will You Know A Good Farmer When You Meet Him? He Will Not Ask You For Any Favors.

Sinclair Lewis May Be Ripe For A Revival; His Books Raise Several Interesting Issues Of Art And Fashion.

Another Thing He Told His Customers Was That One Of The Great Accounting Unknowns Of The Modern Age Was How To Value Knowledge. It Was An Exciting Field.

There Are Several Methods For Introducing Your Children To Driving, And All Of Them Are Bad. Probably The Worst Is To Put It Off.

Trollope Wrote So Many Novels And Other Works That They Tend To Crowd Each Other Out.

It Still Astounds Me, After Forty Years, That There Is No Good Bread Between Chicago And San Francisco.

I Readily Admit It Is Easy To Make Of Horses What We Will. Silent, In Some Ways Reserved, They Allow Us To Train Them, And To Project Our Ideas Upon Them; To Ride And Drive Them, And To Make Them Symbolic, Perhaps To A Greater Degree Than Any Other Species.

Sometimes, A Novel Is Like A Train: The First Chapter Is A Comfortable Seat In An Attractive Carriage, And The Narrative Speeds Up. But There Are Other Sorts Of Trains, And Other Sorts Of Novels. They Rush By In The Dark; Passengers Framed In The Lighted Windows Are Smiling And Enjoying Themselves.

If There's Anything Trollope Novels Always Take Seriously, It Is Money - How It Flows From One Character To Another, How It Is Managed, Who Has It, Who Deserves It, And What It Means To A Character, Male Or Female.

Vets Do What Doctors Used To - Diagnose The Injury Or The Condition, Patch It Up As Best They Can And Remind You That These Things Happen And That In Life We Are Also In The Midst Of Death.

Good Intentions Are Wicked! As Far As I Can See, All They Lead To Are Lies And Delusions.

Good Intentions

In Many Ways, Being Honest About 'huckleberry Finn' Goes Right To The Heart Of Whether We Can Be Honest About Our Heritage And Our Identity As Americans.

The Essence Of Charity ... Was Not Deciding What Others Needed And Giving It To Them, But Giving Them What They Wanted.

In His 30 Years Of Broadcasting And Publishing Fiction, Garrison Keillor Has Set The Laugh Bar Pretty High.

I Was An Only Child. I've Known Only Children. From This Experience, I Do Believe That The Children Should Outnumber The Parents.

Before I Write A Novel, Images Float Around In My Head That Work Like Icons - They Are Meaningless In Themselves, But Serve As Reminders.

Mom Was A Smoker. My Grandfather Was A Smoker. My Aunts Were Smokers. My Uncles Were Smokers. I Don't Know Any Smokers Now, Not Even My Mom.

Eavesdrop And Write It Down From Memory - Gives You A Stronger Sense Of How People Talk And What Their Concerns Are. I Love To Eavesdrop!

Progressivism Is Usually Seen As A Stepping Back From Individualism Into A Progressive Community...

A Love Story, At Least A Convincing One, Requires Three Elements - The Lover, The Beloved, And The Adventures They Have Together.

When A Novel Has 200,000 Words, Then It Is Possible For The Reader To Experience 200,000 Delights, And To Turn Back To The First Page Of The Book And Experience Them All Over Again, Perhaps More Intensely.

As Soon As You Bring Up Money, I Notice, Conversation Gets Sociological, Then Political, Then Moral.

When People Leave, They Always Seem To Scoop Themselves Out Of You.

Giving His Lecture For The Third Time Freed Dr. Lionel Gift From Paying Much Attention To It. He Had A Naturally Expressive Style Of Delivery, Hones Over The Years In Elementary-econ Lecture Halls. He Knew, Without Even Thinking, To Address The Middle Rows Of The Hall, But To Occasionally "shoot" The Listeners In The Back Corners. He Knew How To Make Eye Contact And Solicit The Attention Of Those Who Were Thinking Of Other Things.

Not Every Novel That Wants To Be A Tragedy Gets To Be One.

Writing Novels Is An Essentially Amateur Activity.

Why Are We Reading A Shakespeare Play Or 'huckleberry Finn?' Well, Because These Works Are Great, But They Also Tell Us Something About The Times In Which They Were Created. Unfortunately, Previous Eras And Dead Authors Often Used Language Or Accepted As Normal Sentiments That We Now Find Unacceptable.

Critical Thinking Is To A Liberal Education As Faith Is To Religion. ... The Converse Was True Also - Faith Is To A Liberal Education As Critical Thinking Is To Religion, Irrelevant And Even Damaging.

Liberal Education

If To Live Is To Progress, If You Are Lucky, From Foolishness To Wisdom, Then To Write Novels Is To Broadcast The Various Stages Of Your Foolishness.

With Preference Came Point Of View; With Point Of View, Personality; With Personality, Uniqueness; With Uniqueness, Grief.

With Any Novel That You Begin, You Can't Foresee How Difficult Or Easy It's Going To Be, And You Can't Really Prepare Yourself. You Just Have A Take It One Step At A Time And Know That It's All Right To Keep Going - You Can Always Fix It.

One Step At A Time

I'm A Natural Novelist. I'm Interested In The Person And The Group, And How They Mesh. And One Of The Ways I Don't Want Them To Mesh Is For The Person To Be Subsumed Into The Group.

A Bookstore Is One Of The Few Places Where All The Cantankerous, Conflicting, Alluring Voices Of The World Co-exist In Peace And Order And The Avid Reader Is As Free As A Person Can Possibly Be, Because She Is Free To Choose Among Them.

I Discovered That The Horse Is Life Itself, A Metaphor But Also An Example Of Life's Mystery And Unpredictability, Of Life's Generosity And Beauty, A Worthy Object Of Repeated And Ever Changing Contemplation.

You Know That The Urge For Revenge Is A Fact Of Marital Life.

A Novelist Has Two Lives-- A Reading And Writing Life, And A Lived Life. He Or She Cannot Be Understood At All Apart From This.

After A Long Day, Folk Rest At Night. After A Long Summer, Folk Play Games And Sit About In The Winter. After A Long Life Folk Sit About The Fire And Stay Warm, For The Chill Of Death Is Upon Them, And Even The Thickest Bearskin Can't Keep Off The Shivering.

Twenty-five, He Was. Twenty-five Tomorrow. Some Years The Snow Had Melted For His Birthday, But Not This Year, And So It Had Been A Long Winter Full Of Cows.

Men Are Competent In Groups That Mimic The Playground, Incompetent In Groups That Mimic The Family

The Thing About Republicans Is That They Don't Care So Much About Respect, But They Love Fear, At Least In Others.

I Spent Part Of My College Years In A Marxist Commune. I Was Not A Marxist. I Wasn't Even Pretending To Be One. I Was A Marxist-in-law.

The Desire To Write A Novel Is The Single Required Prerequisite For Writing A Novel.

Whatever You Love Is Beautiful; Love Comes First, Beauty Follows. The Greater Your Capacity For Love, The More Beauty You Find In The World.

You Cannot Be An Egomaniac On The Horse. If You Lose Your Temper And Start Beating Him, Either You Will Destroy Him, Or He Will Destroy You. As Soon As You Start Riding Horses Seriously, You're Being Disciplined On A Daily Basis About How Ignorant You Are And What There Is Left For You To Learn.

I Have Noticed Before That There Is A Category Of Acquaintanceship That Is Not Friendship Or Business Or Romance, But Speculation, Fascination.

Every Novel Deals With Social Problems. It Can't Help It Because The Protagonist Must Come In Conflict With His Group. So The Author Has To Offer An Analysis Of How The Group And The Protagonist Fit. Otherwise, The Reader Will Just Say, "this Makes No Sense," And Will Put It Away.

Many People, Myself Among Them, Feel Better At The Mere Sight Of A Book.

Americans Took A Great Deal Too Much Credit For Creating Wealth, When Most Of The Time They Had Really Just Been Living Off Natural Bounty Unprecedented In The History Of The World.

I Thought I Might Write Mysteries For The Rest Of My Life.

A Horse Herd Was, In Its Very Essence, The Manifestation Of The Expression 'it's Always Something.

I Was Depressed, But That Was A Side Issue. This Was More Like Closing Up Shop, Or, Say, Having A Big Garage Sale, Where You Look At Everything You've Bought In Your Life, And You Remember How Much It Meant To You, And Now You Just Tag It For A Quarter And Watch 'em Carry It Off, And You Don't Care. That's More Like How It Was.

Hungry Ears Are Sharp Ones.

I Suspected That There Were Things He Knew That I Had Been Waiting All My Life To Learn.

A Reader's Tastes Are Peculiar. Choosing Books To Read Is Like Making Your Way Down A Remote And Winding Path. Your Stops On That Path Are Always Idiosyncratic. One Book Leads To Another And Another The Way One Thought Leads To Another And Another. My Type Of Reader Is The Sort Who Burrows Through The Stacks In The Bookstore Or The Library (or The Web Site — Stacks Are Stacks), Yielding To Impulse And Instinct.

Everything Is Toxic. That's The Point. You Can't Avoid Toxins. Thinking You Can Is Just Another Symptom Of The Toxic Overload Stage.

My Great Fear Is Not That I'll Run Out Of Ideas. It's That I'll Run Out Of Time.

An Urban Novelist Never Minds A Little Decay.

A Child Who Is Protected From All Controversial Ideas Is As Vulnerable As A Child Who Is Protected From Every Germ. The Infection, When It Comes- And It Will Come- May Overwhelm The System, Be It The Immune System Or The Belief System.

Write Every Day, Just To Keep In The Habit, And Remember That Whatever You Have Written Is Neither As Good Nor As Bad As You Think It Is. Just Keep Going, And Tell Yourself That You Will Fix It Later.

There Are Five Things That Societies Do: They Reproduce; They Produce Food; They Organize Themselves In Terms Of Law; They Organize Themselves In Terms Of Belief; And They Make Art. Four Of Them Are About Conformity, And In These, Everything Would Go More Smoothly If People Just Would Shut Up And Do What They're Told. But In Art It Doesn't Work That Way.

My Characters Never Die Screaming In Rage. They Attempt To Pull Themselves Back Together And Go On. And That's Basically A Conservative View Of Life.

Novelists Of A Conservative Or More Purely Aesthetic Bent Hold Up Better On The Surface, But Their Novels Go In And Out Of Fashion According To Relevance Or Irrelevance.

People Are Quite Frequently Eccentric.

In My Experience, There Is Only One Motivation, And That Is Desire. No Reasons Or Principle Contain It Or Stand Against It.

Ignorance And Bloodlust Have A Long Tradition In The United States, Especially In The Red States.

I Say, When Your Hair Turns Gray And Your Children Think They Know Who You Are, Do The Thing That Shakes Up Who You Think You Are, Even Who You Had Prided Yourself On Being. When All Those Around You Say They Simply Don't Recognize You Any Longer, That's The Real Compliment.

Another Thing I Learned Is That Novels, Even Those From Apparently Distant Times And Places, Remain Current And Enlightening, And Also Comforting.

The Only Siblings I Have Are Half-siblings. My Nuclear Family Would Have Been An Extra-suffocating Threesome. Instead, I Have An Interesting Brother And Sister, In-laws, And Darling Nephews.

Gossip. The More You Talk About Why People Do Things, The More Ideas You Have About How The World Works.

I Wrote The Dickens Book Because I Loved Dickens, Not Because I Felt A Kinship With Him, But After Writing The Book It Seemed To Me That There Was At Least One Similarity Between Us And That Was That Dickens Loved To Write And Wrote With The Ease And Conviction Of Breathing. Me, Too.

The Novel As A Form Is Usually Seen To Be Moral If Its Readers Consider Freedom, Individuality, Democracy, Privacy, Social Connection, Tolerance And Hope To Be Morally Good, But It Is Not Considered Moral If The Highest Values Of A Society Are Adherence To Rules And Traditional Mores, The Maintenance Of Hierarchical Relationships, And Absolute Ideas Of Right And Wrong. Any Society Based On The Latter Will Find Novels Inherently Immoral And Subversive.

English Majors Understand Human Nature Better Than Economists Do.

My Mom Was Paranoid About My Safety.

Respect And Fear Are Two Different Things.

Two Different Things

Some Novelists Are Luckier Than Others In The Eras Of Their Formative Intellectual Years, But All Weltanschauungs Return, Which Means That Most Novelists Have At Least A Chance Of A Revival.

Most Of My Childhood Revolved Around Wondering When We Would Be Blown Up By The Russians. I Couldn't Stand The News, I Knew That If The Missile Were Launched, Mortality Would Arrive In Half An Hour, So I Spent A Lot Of My Childhood Feeling That I Was 30 Minutes From Being Dead.

All Equestrians, If They Last Long Enough, Learn That Riding In Whatever Form Is A Lifelong Sport And Art, An Endeavor That Is Both Familiar And New Every Time You Take The Horse Out Of His Stall Or Pasture.

There Is A Sociology Of Horses, As Well As A Psychology. It Is Most Evident In The World Of Horse Racing, Where Many Horses Are Gathered Together, Where Year After Year, Decade After Decade, They Do The Same, Rather Simple Thing - Run In Races And Try To Win.

A Novelist Is On The Cusp Between Someone Who Knows Everything And Someone Who Knows Nothing.

Novelists Never Have To Footnote.

Ignorance Is A Self-generating State Of Mind; One Of Its Characteristics Is That It Doesn't Recognize Itself As Ignorance.

Fascination With Horses Predated Every Other Single Thing I Knew. Before I Was A Mother, Before I Was A Writer, Before I Knew The Facts Of Life, Before I Was A Schoolgirl, Before I Learned To Read, I Wanted A Horse.

I Had Spent Years Thinking About One Thing While I Was Doing Another. I Had, In Fact, Prided Myself On Being Able To Do Two Things At Once.

Love Is A General Emotion. Marriage Is Exactingly Specific.

One Of The Things That Ivar Knew About Mrs. Walker Was That She Would Only Tell Him What She Knew If He Asked The Right Question, So He Spent A Portion Of His Time Meditating Over What He Might Ask Mrs. Walker And How He Might Phrase The Question.

Candy Is My Fuel. Ice Cream, Too.

The Brave View Is That Talking It Out Helps Work It Out. Maybe The Realistic View Is That Talking It Out Inflames The Issues Further. But That Is America, Especially These Days.

Every First Draft Is Perfect, Because All A First Draft Has To Do Is Exist.

There Weren't Too Many Books By Women That Were Taught In School, So I Read Those On My Own, And The Books I Read Were As Accessible As The Ones We Were Reading In School.

Charles Dickens Was An Avid Seeker Of Names - He Read Directories And Looked For Odd Names On Gravestones.

Because Your Goal Is A Complete Rough Draft Of A Novel, And Every Rough Draft, By Being Complete, Is Perfect.

I Don't Know - Is Everything The U.s. Does A Shocking Embarrassment?

We Sort Of Read Two Or Three Big Newspapers But We Don't Get The Flavor Of The Local Events, The Local News As Much.

I Was Asked By An Editor To Consider Writing Something About An American Inventor. I Asked Him If He Knew Who Invented The Computer. He Said He Didn't. In That Case, I Told Him, I Should Write A Book About John Vincent Atanasoff.

I Love To Write About Sex. You Just Have To Make It Idiosyncratic. You Have To Have A Strong Comprehension Of Your Characters, And Write It From Their Point Of View. It's Really Fun. It's Not Erotic.

People With Good Intentions Never Give Up!

Good Intentions

I Loved The House The Way You Would Any New House, Because It Is Populated By Your Future, The Family Of Children Who Will Fill It With Noise Or Chaos And Satisfying Busy Pleasures.

I Think That The Cold War Was An Exceptional And Unnecessary Piece Of Cruelty.

Art Doesn't Exist If You Just Do What You're Told. It Only Exists As An Exercise Of Individual Taste And Freedom.

Horse Racing Is Really Much More Intimidating Than Anything Having To Do With Literature. When I Had Horses At The Racetrack, I Would Wake Up In Terror In A Way That I Would Never Wake Up While Working On A Novel.

In December 1998, I Considered Myself An Expert On Love. I Was Almost A Year Into A Relationship, One That Had Grown More Slowly Than I Had Wished, But Once It Flowered It Was Much More Stimulating Than Any Marriage Or Relationship I Had Known.

Some People Do Wait Their Whole Lives For Something, And It's Only When That Thing Arrives That They Find Out That They've Been Waiting Rather Than Living.

When 'the Awakening' Was Published It Was Considered So Scandalous It Was Banned In The Author's Home-town Library, And She Herself Was Barred From The Fine Arts Club In The Same City. What The Novel Has To Offer, Among Other Things, Is Honesty.

The Body, The Mind, And The Spirit Don't Form A Pyramid, They Form A Circle. Each Of Them Runs Into The Other Two. The Body Isn't Below The Mind And The Spirit; From The Point Of View It's Between Them. If You Reside Too Much In The Mind, Then You Get Too Abstract And Cut Off From The World. You Long For The Spiritual Life, But You Can't Get To It, And You Fall Into Despair. The Exercise Of The Senses Frees You From Abstraction And Opens The Way To Transcendence.

Even If My Marriage Is Falling Apart And My Children Are Unhappy, There Is Still A Part Of Me That Says, 'god, This Is Fascinating!'

I Learned Why 'out Riding Alone' Is An Oxymoron: An Equestrian Is Never Alone, Is Always Sensing The Other Being, The Mysterious But Also Understandable Living Being That Is The Horse.

If Novels And Stories Are Bulletins From The Progressive States Of Ignorance A Writer Passes Through Over The Years, Observations And Opinions About Horses Are All The More So, Since Horses Are More Mysterious Than Life And Harder To Understand.

Take Naps. Often New Ideas Come Together When You Are Half Asleep, But You Have To Train Yourself To Remember Them.

When I Went To First Grade And The Other Children Said That Their Fathers Were Farmers, I Simply Didn't Believe Them. I Agreed In Order To Be Polite, But In My Heart I Knew That Those Men Were Impostors, As Farmers And As Fathers, Too. In My Youthful Estimation, Laurence Cook Defined Both Categories. To Really Believe That Others Even Existed In Either Category Was To Break The First Commandment.

Many Said That Now There Was No Hope Of Salvation, For A Man Might Do Anything And Be In The Wrong. There Was No Way To Tell. It Was Better To Stay On The Steading And Mind The Cows And Be Content With Such Days As Are Left To One And Cease To Wonder About Life Everlasting.

The Main Thing About The Novel That Is Totally Fascinating: It's Not Possessed By The Writer; It's Possessed By The Reader.

Like Most Of The Educated, I Do Harbor A Fondness For The Sins Of My Ignorant Past.

The Fundamental Condition Of Childhood Is Powerlessness.

Trending Author

Sydney Schanberg

Category