I’ve been reading here and there inside
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley for awhile now. The other day I took it up again with a renewed sort of vigor on account of the NaNoWriMo/Mominator Challenge.
If you should pick it up at a bookstore, maybe don’t go by the back flap description–I found it somewhat misrepresentative in tone. While the book is “seductive,” it certainly isn’t a fireworks display that keeps you pinned to your seat as the back copy would have you think it is. The book is not loud and all up in your face. No, thus far, the book’s content–the points about narrative that Smiley makes–is more impressive and graceful than that.
Smiley’s prose plods along really. She’s unrelenting in her patient consideration of every detail in the novel’s development. The art of the novel, the psychology of the novel, morality and the novel... And so bits of thoughts build to observations, observations build to conclusions, and it is those conclusions that are especially grand. For someone like myself, a part-time dunderhead when it comes to unlocking why this or that technique in a narrative of my own making works or does not work, Smiley’s book is astonishingly helpful.
For example, I flipped to a section called A Novel of Your Own (I). (This is a very timely chapter for me, the Mominator, and now, potentially, my Aunt K.) In the chapter, Smiley talks about how no one asked you to write the dang thing, so why feel pressure? If anything, no one wants to see what you’ve written. Friends, family. They’re gritting their teeth to escape notice by Smiling You, novel manuscript in hand. She implies that there is freedom in this lack of expectation. I’d have to agree.
Smiley also advises you make your novel so intriguing to write that it would tear you up to be apart from it. If eventually bored with your novel, she says, it may be because you don’t know enough about your material. Ignorance sometimes masquerades as boredom and she advises not to “think your way out of it” but to energize by investigating your subject more. Of course, she adds, you could be bored because you’re befuddled about the overall organization of the action, how the plot is unfurling.
And don’t you rewrite until you’re done. Getting to into rewriting, while writing the first draft, just dredges up self-doubt. Which, obviously, you want to keep at bay.
The chapter and the rest of the book abounds with oodles more useful and intriguing thoughts put more cleverly than I can manage here. I recommend looking at it.
Here's her
publisher's website for the book, along with excerpts, and where you can get it.
I have to say, listening to Got Radio's The Big Score station with -- you guessed it -- nothing but musical scores from movies is utterly pleasurable. It's like slipping in narrative during the day. All of a sudden I feel the need to laugh or to hide a mysterious falcon statue, but I don't know why. It's the music! Not so great to listen to while writing though as it totally messes your pacing up.
