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Oct
28
Written by:
lara wells
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Over the past four weeks, I’ve shared with you the highlights of each chapter of 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley. It’s a book that came into my life when I needed it most and has become an invaluable resource to me in both my writing and my reading of novels.
I hope this series of posts and the quotes I posted on Twitter has inspired you in your writing (and reading) as it did mine. For my final post, I’ve pulled together my 13 favorite quotes from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.
Here they are:
- “The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel. The desire does not guarantee that the resulting novel will be a good one, but it is the only way to begin.”
- “A novel is a hypothesis. A novelist shares with a scientist the wish to observe. Both novelist and scientist say, ‘what if?’ Every novel must embody a theory of how life works or it could not have a beginning, middle, and, especially, an end.”
- “A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing. Their job is to develop a theory of what it feels like to be alive. The most basic conviction of every novelist is that things are not as they appear.”
- "When the reader accepts the first line of a book, she agrees to think about the same things, and in the same degree of detail and in the same order, that the writer has chosen to think about. A novel unfolds in the author’s mind and the reader’s mind simultaneously.”
- “At the base of every novel is an argument the author is making about why a novel is worth writing, selling and reading.”
- “The way in which novels are created – someone is seized by inspiration and then works out his inspiration methodically by writing, observing, writing, observing, thinking through, and writing again – is by nature deliberate, dominated neither by reason nor by emotion. “
- “There is no single quality that the ‘great’ novels share… Each one has a distinct type of greatness.”
- “As you write the first word, you are embracing the novel’s greatest tradition, that of obscure beginnings."
- “Writing a novel is easy because there is nothing simpler than adding word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and then going back and reading and writing it over again.”
- “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."
- “When you begin your novel, you know enough about your material to begin it, but not enough to finish it. As you write, you learn about what you are writing. Everything, in fact, that carries you out into the world, teaches you to observe, and rewards your observation with some worthy nugget is good.”
- “Once you get to the end of the rough draft, you can go back and reshape, rewrite, remake it as many times as you want to. It is, after all, only the rough draft, and in rough drafts, all is forgiven. Every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.”
- “To write through to the end of the rough draft, in spite of time constraints, second thoughts, self-doubts, and judgments of all kinds, is an act of faith that is invariably rewarded. The rough draft of a novel is the absolute paradigm of something that comes from nothing.”
All quotes are from Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.
lara
My Story Writer
www.mywritingsoftware.com
Miss a post from the 13 Ways series? Find it here:
Kickoff: The 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel | The 13 Ways | I Hate Introductions | What is the Novel? |Who is the Novelist? | Origins: Where did the Novel Come From? | The Psychology of the Novel | Morality of the Novel | The Art of the Novel | The Novel and History | The Circle of the Novel | The Novel's Greatest Tradition: Obscure Beginnings | The Novel-Writing Pyramid of Skills |The Ultimate Fact About Novel-Writing | The Perfect Rough Draft
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