Why We Write (24 page)

Jane Smiley

Why I write

I write to investigate things I’m curious about.

A novelist’s job is to integrate information with the feelings and the stories of her characters, because a novel is about the alternation of the inner world and the outer world, what happens and what the characters feel about it. There’s no reason to write a novel unless you’re going to talk about the inner lives of your characters. Without that, the material is dry. But without events and information, the novel seems subjective and pointless.

You can see in the earliest novels, as they were forming themselves historically, that there was this impulse to find out stuff. Don Quixote thinks he’s setting out to save something, but what he’s really doing, as Cervantes follows him along, is
finding out how the world works in comparison to how he thought it worked from reading his beloved romances. The whole point of
Don Quixote
is to show the conflict between what he thought was true and what he learns when he goes out there. It’s not only a seminal work, it’s the seminal motive for writing a novel.

When I was researching the nonfiction book I wrote about the novel, I discovered the childhoods of most novelists were similar to mine. Almost all novelists grew up reading voraciously, and many of them come from families in which it’s automatic to tell stories about family characters, Aunt Ruth or whomever, and they are curious and/or observant. I was one of those kids who had to be told to stop asking questions all the time. That’s what novelists do. We gather information, and we form what we learn into a story.

I loved to read, and I read lots of series books, such as Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey twins. I considered the novelists I read to be my friends. I wasn’t intimidated by them—they were doing me a favor, telling me these stories. When I got older, in high school, I discovered that the American writer-ideal was Hemingway for a boy or Fitzgerald for a girl. An aspiring author of serious literature could be a he-man writer like Hemingway or a she-man writer like Fitzgerald. There were no female-writer role models.

Imagine a girl sitting at her desk in ninth grade, scratching her head, saying, I can’t write
The Sun Also Rises
; I’m a girl. My only alternative is
The Great Gatsby
. But look what happened to Fitzgerald: he published four books and died of alcoholism and his first book was the only good one. Who wants
that
?

In college I found my other options: Virginia Woolf, Brontë,
Austen. But they weren’t Americans. So I got used to looking to England for role models.

A pebble becomes a seed

When I’m in the act of writing, more than any other emotion, I feel
excited.

I can’t say I’m never frustrated, but I’ve been at this a really long time now, so I have ways of dealing with the frustration. I know that at some point in every day’s writing, there will be a sort of takeoff. It might be early, it might be late, but there’s a place where I feel the energy moving
itself
forward, instead of me pushing it.

One of the things I like about writing is that sense of the story unfolding. You throw this pebble into your story because you can’t think of anything better, just to keep going. Then it stops being a little pebble and starts being a little seed, and suddenly it has shoots. It begins to grow.

I’m writing a book now that I’m sure will see the light of day, but God knows when. It’s a what-if book about one of my horses: what if she were racing at Auteuil, the jumper course outside Paris? And what if she got out of her stall and headed into Paris? It’s a really fun idea, but it has high levels of plausibility problems.

While I was working on it the other day, I came to a bump in the road. I didn’t know
what
to do next. So I introduced a raven. He started out as a pebble. Then I looked up some facts about ravens, and then those were pretty interesting. I could feel the shoots begin around the raven. I could feel him start to speak in his own voice, becoming a little self-important, and
suddenly the energy of the narrative entered into his voice. He became a raven from a long noble family of ravens, very proud of himself, very talkative. Somehow in the next few weeks he’s going to help the horse.

That’s what I like the most about writing a story: the way a
thing
comes in as a pebble and blossoms.

How I knew

During my senior year at Vassar, I wrote a novel as my senior thesis. It was an adolescent novel about the traumatic relationship of two college students. It’s somewhere in the Vassar library now.

Knowing that I was going to be a writer was a function of knowing that I really enjoyed writing that novel. It grew out of curiosity—and the other thing that all my work (and a lot of literary work) grows out of, which is gossip. There was a girl and a guy in my class, and even though they weren’t connected, I brought them together because they were the two weirdest people I knew. I can barely remember that novel now, but I remember how much I enjoyed writing it. It was much, much fun, and
that
was
that
for me.

My own private Iowa

In 1975, the year after I graduated from Vassar, I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was rejected, but my husband was accepted to the history department, so we moved to Iowa. I worked in a teddy bear factory. Someone else stuffed the teddy bears. My job was to sew the back seam.

The next year I applied to the workshop again. This time I got in. My fellow students were quite good. We had Allan Gurganus, Jayne Anne Phillips, T. C. Boyle, John Givens, Richard Bausch. Everyone was very dedicated and professional and kind. Then I got a Fulbright and went to Iceland for a year. I’d spent most of grad school studying Old Icelandic literature, and I was going to write my PhD dissertation about it. My adviser said, “We don’t really need another dissertation on Old Icelandic. We have enough of those already.” So I turned in stories I had written instead, and then after I graduated, I wrote the first part of my first real novel.

The best of times

Writing my third novel was the best time I’ve ever had as a writer. I felt I was being manipulated from afar.

It seemed that the characters were using me as a secretary to write their story. I really enjoyed that. Every day I’d go sit in front of the typewriter and I’d join my characters in fourteenth-century Greenland, Europe’s most far-flung trading outpost, and I’d put on my imaginary bearskin coat, and it would all just come out.

About twelve years later, I had a similar experience with another novel. That one also felt like I was being told the story, this time by the horse out in the barn, Mr. T.

The other books weren’t bad experiences. Just different.

It gets better…

I believe that you either love the work or the rewards. Life is a lot easier if you love the work.

I’m lucky. I like the work more all the time. I’m even more curious now. I have more ideas. I’m more enthusiastic. I have more faith that the pebble will turn into a seed. My great fear is not that I’ll run out of subjects. It’s that I’ll run out of time.

If you’re curious, there’s always a subject to write about. I always was interested in the outer world. I’ll paste in a few things from my inner life if there’s nothing else to put in, but it’s not my goal in life to write about myself.

Some of my books have been more carefully planned than others. When I was writing
A Thousand Acres
, based on Shakespeare’s
King Lear
, I made a rule that I couldn’t diverge from Shakespeare’s plot. That got sticky. For example: No, they couldn’t have a war! They were a farm family in Iowa. So I gave them a legal battle instead.

When I was about two-thirds of the way through, I realized that I
had
departed from the plot. I had to go back and fix it. If a book has a plan, it’s more difficult to write than a book that just has a form.

Ten Days in the Hills
had a form rather than a plan. I knew it was going to be ten days. I knew that each of the days was going to be about equal in length. I really wanted the book to be 444 pages long. I don’t know why; it just came to me as a kind of puzzle. I thought the structure of the puzzle would compensate for the looseness of the quote-unquote plot.

As I saw the word count mount up, I thought, Hmm, we could have real numbers here. I have to say, my editor wasn’t sympathetic to the number magic. She got a little irritated with my desire to make
Ten Days
exactly 444 pages long.

Except when it gets worse

I wrote one of my novels in first person, and it was dead on arrival—I think because my protagonist wasn’t the sort of person who’d know or say the things that needed to be said.

So I switched to third person and rewrote it. In that draft there was too much information. My protagonist’s inner voice had disappeared. The characters kept lying there, semidead. Even though I was fearful and anxious, I couldn’t stop going back to it. I thought it was a story worth telling.

The turning point came at draft four or five. I asked my accountant’s book group to read it. They really liked it, and they also had appropriate suggestions. That was the moment I knew the book wasn’t a lost cause, because it appealed to its audience, mature women.

I’ve never given up on a novel. Although I had my doubts about
A Thousand Acres
. I was writing it in the winter in this little office in our new house in Ames, Iowa. I kept falling asleep as I wrote. I put the manuscript aside, thinking it must be really boring. Then spring came and I reread it, and it seemed pretty good.

It turned out the chimney of the furnace was leaking carbon monoxide. When we stopped using the furnace, the novel stopped putting me to sleep. The lesson there is, sometimes it’s not as bad as you think.

Rumors of the novel’s death have been
greatly exaggerated

The novel as a form is extremely capacious. They’ve been saying the novel is dying forever and ever, and it’s still here. Of course I’m worried about the future of the novel. But I’m not
worried
about it. The novel is irreplaceable.

Or not

In the 1980s, publishing companies began to consolidate, and they got bigger and bigger. In the ’90s, everyone rode the gravy train. Then the train crashed.

For writers, there’s always been a tension between money and fame. If you’re on the money side, that’s your compensation. You can do what Jodi Picoult talked about in terms of being labeled “chick lit” versus “literary fiction”: “weep into her check.” If you’re on the fame side, and your books are too complex to be bestsellers, that’s your compensation.

Now advances are getting smaller. Bookstores are going under. Who knows what’s going to happen? The real question is, how big a hit will the audience take? Kids are reading books; that’s the only good sign there is. That doesn’t mean it’s going to pan out, but it’s something.

What we have to look at in the death of the novel is the departure of male readers. The lionization of Updike and Mailer and those guys depended on the male infrastructure of literature: editors, reviewers, kvellers picking the dominant male; writers arguing among themselves about who was the dominant male. That culture of male dominance is gone now. They keep
trying to revive it with Jonathan Franzen, but unless men come back to reading, it’s not going to revive.

I say, let’s talk about Franzen after his tenth book. Let’s see if there’s consistency in his body of work.

Boys and girls—together?

If you ask a group of men how many books by women they’ve read in the past year, no hands will go up. If you ask a group of women how many books by men or women they’ve read, it’s about equal. I’m one of them. I read both.

In 2005 the
New York Times Book Review
asked me to blog about a survey they did. They asked two hundred editors, authors, and critics—one hundred men, one hundred women—to name the best books of the past forty years.
Beloved
came in first. The next ten books were by men. Then came Marilynne Robinson.

Men returned sixty-two percent of the surveys that came back. Except for
Beloved
, they all voted for male writers. The women voted for both women and men. A lot of women didn’t bother to vote. I wrote in my blog that maybe the women didn’t believe in that hierarchical view of literature. They thought it was a stupid question, whereas the men thought it was an important question.

Curiouser and curiouser

Believe me, I’m not complaining. I’ve been really lucky. It does still happen that I go to my publisher and say, “I have this idea,” and they say,
“What?
” When I went to my agent with
A Thousand Acres
,
she said, “Are you kidding? Nobody wants to read about
crops
.” Then I turned in the book, and it was fine.

I’ve had some rewards. Rewards are fantasies. You can’t wish for an award. You cannot say, “My career will finally be worth it if I win the Nobel Prize.” That’s false consciousness.

If your career wasn’t worth it while you were writing those books, then what a sad life you’ve led. For me, it goes back to curiosity. I suppose my career will be over when I look around and say, “This is all boring; there’s nothing more that interests me.”

You want your interests to outrun your actual days on earth.