An Evening with Jane Smiley - Point Loma Writer's Symposium By The Sea 2018

welcome to the 23rd annual writers symposium by the sea at Point Loma Nazarene University I'm Dean Nelson on the journalism faculty at the University and with us tonight is a national treasure Jane smiley novelist biographer short story writer essayist Pulitzer Prize winner lover of horses she has a trilogy that covers a hundred years of a family's story and a farms interaction with that story it's just a privilege to have you with us thank you Jane smiley welcome to the writers info so perhaps the best word I can use to describe your work is versatility I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you this but when I think about it essays and novels and short stories and biographies varied topics a lot of writers just pick a niche they pick a topic crime you know whatever and they just kind of go with that forever until the end of their their their literary life but you've developed this ability to get into all these different genres I assume this is a conscious choice on your part to not be pigeonholed in just kind of one area well I wouldn't say it was a conscious choice it's it was a semi conscious choice you know I I always say uncle bill Shakespeare taught me and Uncle Bill have you traced oh yeah no okay but when I was in junior high and high school we had to read a Shakespeare play every year and we would we started out with the comedies and we ended up with King Lear we ended up in the tragedies and one of the things that always struck me about reading the Shakespeare plays was how he would do this and then he would do this then he would do this and then he would do this and I also love to read and I love different authors and so there were no forms that I preferred I I loved all the forms so when I was in graduate school I took a lot of old Icelandic and I loved the sagas and that was my first true experience of the epic form and I love comedies and I really like tragedies and so and I went and I studied medieval literature too and I like romances so it never occurred to me to stick with one form now I will say that when I came I I went on a Fulbright to Iceland when I came home from Iceland I knew that I wanted to write the Green Landers and I knew that was going to be the epic but I also knew that I to practice in order to write that kind of a book you work your way up to it well I had to practice plotting I had to practice getting it organized and and so I decided then that I was going to write in every form but I knew that I had to prepare and so the first few books were trying to figure out what to do so in barn blind I took material that I knew pretty well and I fiddled with that to see if I could make a novel of it and then in that paradise skate I took some family material fiddled with that tried to make a novel of that I decided now I didn't want to write about my family though they were receptive they didn't they weren't upset about it or anything and then I knew that I wanted to do the green liners and that was going to be really long so I decided that I would better write a murder-mystery because that would teach me how to construct a plot and so I wrote duplicate keys and so I called those the practice novels and I had a lot of fun and the great thing about doing practice novels in in my day was that yes they got published but no they weren't any big sensations so I could try stuff out and then publication and a couple of reviews constituted a little pat on the head and so I could keep going and not there was nothing either saying to me oh this is so fabulous you got to keep writing no there wasn't that but then there was also sufficient success so that I could keep going and enjoy it and that was that was my biggest piece of luck I think yeah I've never thought of it that way where where what you're working on at the time you might be fully committed to it but you also know this isn't this isn't the big thing I'm headed toward this is well I I knew the Greenlanders was the big thing I was never toward and I didn't know what was going to come after that but that was sufficient to sort of keep me moving forward for those first eight ten years well because though of your ability to write in all of these different areas the New York Times said that your ability to master all genres drives other writers crazy we're a jealous but I'm not sure that it's I'm not sure that he took a poll or anything all right well maybe just drove him crazy apologize for driving anybody crazy well so let's focus for a while and what you what you do the most which is writing novels mm-hm so you said that the only prerequisite this is from your thirteen ways right yeah and I think you know where I'm going yeah the only prerequisite for writing novel is the desire to write a novel yes but I mean that seems kind of obvious but you go on to say and the only it's the only thing that overcomes all of the handicaps to writing that novel which are do you want do you know the list by heart you can I don't know this by heart okay interested to hear it so so these these are all the handicaps to writing a novel perfectionism low self-esteem depression alcoholism diseases of all cats a good one immense riches economic hardship deadly enemies resistance of relatives and friends laziness professional development the regular responsibilities of adulthood and even imprisonment those are that those are the handicaps some of the handicaps and you're saying the desire to write a novel is what overcomes those can overcome that I mean I came up with this set of handicaps because and I'm we're thinking handicapped in terms of like a horse race where the horses are have to carry a certain weight owing to how much they've won before so some horses in the race are carrying more weight and some horses in the race are carrying less weight and it's supposed to even out the field so I'm thinking of those kind of handicaps not like physical handicaps you're not looking at them as impediments necessarily well they can be impediments but that but desire is what the this feeling of desire this and for me that's a sense of curiosity that's the thing that overcomes what is holding you back and I have to say for me the thing that's holding me back is always laziness and it and I'm just sorry it you've written dozen you've written more than then then a library could hold and you're saying you deal with laziness I do deal with laziness but it's not laziness about just writing it's laziness about everything okay and so my I talk I always say there's there's laziness and there's addiction and laziness is where yeah and you don't want to do it you're not going to do it why should I do it and then you go do it and you feel great afterwards addiction is where you're saying I want to do it I want to do I want to do it and then you do it you feel terrible afterwards interesting and so it's better to be lazy than addicted now that's carried you this far but there are people who love who want to write and want to write and and can't stop themselves from writing but then they're dissatisfied with what it is they wrote and one of the things one of my other quotes from 13 ways of looking at the novel is that every first draft is perfect because it never existed before mm-hmm and that's the thing you have to tell yourself when you are working on the first draft of any book you have to just get to the end because I've known so many writers who had lots of talents and skills but as they were going along they think US chapters a pieces okay you know I I don't know what I'm doing with my blah blah blah blah blah so they're that friend of mine said it was the committee talking to you you know right Stephen King calls them the boys in the basement yeah yeah and so one of the things you have to learn to do is just ignore that and just keep going because you don't know as you're writing what part is really good and what part isn't good you but when you go when you finish and you come back after a few months and read it over again the reader brain the brain that's read all these books way more books than you'll ever write kicks in and says that's working oh that's working man that doesn't work on you to fix it but it's much the reader brain is is not as judgmental mm-hmm as the writer brain and it's also more knowledgeable so you have to just get through that rough draft put it aside and let the reader brain take over as you work on the later drafts this is really interesting because one of the things in writing classes that I teach and I would be interested in in if you have the same experience teaching writing that that is the big problem is students think that the first draft that they turn in has be really superb so they just labor and labor and labor and I'm just saying now just blast it out so you see that that surprise don't just have to turn in draft they have to turn in three drafts in three weeks and then go on to the next story and turn in three drafts and turn in three drafts of the third story and so they know it doesn't have to be doesn't have to be perfect the first week and then but I don't I tell them from the beginning you can't say to your fellow students I like this or I don't like this or this doesn't work or this isn't working or whatever you have to ask questions and be analytical so when they show us the first draft the goal for me is to get them to talk in a way that will make the writer himself or herself totally interested in this and want to play with it and come up with ideas about what's next mm-hmm and be excited to go back and rewrite it for next week and not to be afraid of what the other students are saying and I've been teaching that way for a really long time and it's it's really worked good so so back to back to your novel writing you started out I think you said wanting to communicate a certain truth in or a certain story when you were first writing your novels and it was so it was kind of you dictating this is the story I want to tell but then later on in your work it was it was a little more he would show up and say okay what's what's going to happen next well you do learn to be more open I mean I think they're two kinds of writers at least and one of them is that they have a story about their own lives that are about their own yeah about their own lives that they don't understand and so they involved get involved in writing about it in order to come to an understanding about it and and when they come to the understanding about it in some ways they don't know what to do next there are other writers who write out of curiosity not of their about their own lives but just because they see things and they hear things and they get curious about them one of my favorites of we could take we could take Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope as an example to your literary hero yes and Dickens clearly had several childhood issues that he kept moving toward and moving toward and moving toward and finally dealt with in David Copperfield but took him a long time to get there because he was very secretive about the embarrassments that were his childhood trollop wasn't like that he he as far as we know he didn't write about his childhood and when he got when he got to Ireland to work for the English post office he was motivated to write by two things one was curiosity about Ireland which he didn't know much about but he was travelling all over Ireland to work for the post office and the other one was the habit of telling himself stories to keep himself entertained as he was riding around and so he got very interested in Ireland and he wrote the McDermott's of balli chlorin and the Kelly's and the O'Kelly's they were absolute busts I think the Kelly's in the old Kelly's sold eight copies Wow and it's one of my favorite books I adore the Kelly's of the old Kelly you've got one of the copies I wish I did no I just haven't paid her back but then when he but those were his practice novels similar to mine and so then when he had learned how to make them he he was in Salisbury and walking around Salisbury Cathedral and that's where he came up with the idea of the warden which was the first volume of the bar Chester series so by the time he got famous he was on he still kept his job he still kept doing things the way he did them and he just sort of moved smoothly along Dickens was much more rattled by his fame and much more he had to screw around with his books much more in order to make them work by the time he between the time he was 24 and published The Pickwick Papers and the time say he was 30 so who do you most aligned with I'm more trollop II in terms of what I'm interested in and what I explore he always he always seemed to explore what he looked saw yeah and what he was curious about but you you've had these different kinds of experiences in writing novels what were at one stage of your writing life you're you're the one who's this is the idea I'm exploring but you've also had some experiences where it was like you received a story I've had that one experience alright but that that's big this is greenlight I was the big one yeah it I knew that I was gonna write the Greenlanders because I really wanted to I'd read a lot of Icelandic sagas I'd take an Old Norse I'd take an Old English I was fascinated I'd been to Iceland and I was fascinated by and also I grew up during the Cold War so I thought the end of the world was immediate you know and then I've heard about the Greenland colony the North's Greenland colony were at the end of the world had happened and I had to explore that but I'd also knew it was going to be a really big deal so I had to practice to get there right so one of the things when you're writing a historical novel that you have to decide is is my style going to imitate all that style of that period or is it going to be a sort of straightforward modern style and maybe imitate the dialect in the dialogue and I went back and forth about that and my my model was the the Christian Lawrence daughter by.ya sigrid undset and she she imitated the North style and I found that involving and I also knew that I'd written I read and translated so many sagas that I could give it a go you know and but my experience was I fiddled around fiddled around fiddled around the first 50 pages I I tried my best I could rewrote them and rewrote them and then once it clicked we were off and it and it really was like being was having the story come to me from before from afar it was like I wrote it on my first computer and I would sit down and it was like pulling the bearskin rug over my shoulders and just going into it and it was a very uncanny experience well didn't you also sense that the characters were saying to you thank you for resurrecting us thank you for telling us telling the our story no I didn't feel that they had any any actual gratitude anyway thinking about yeah yeah I know you said that at some point so no I never would have ever said they can't feel gratitude why would they feel gratitude they're green Landers there's our to excellent point I did I do remember I got you know those were the days where you sometimes got a letter from somebody and at the end of the Greenlanders the main character feels remorse and I got an enraged letter from a guy who'd read it all the way to the end and he could not believe that I had allowed or invited a North character to feel remorse and then I looked at the return address and he lived in a mental institution so he was kind of obsessive but you know be careful those letters that you get do you think it's universally part of the human experience to be a storyteller I hope so you know it seems to be because as soon as you have language and as soon as you have a sense of the difference between the present and the past then you're going to start communicating about things that have happened and then as soon as you communicate about things that have happened you're going to be you're going to start having doubts about how it happened why it happened and whether it happened and then bingo you're going to start telling stories just to keep to keep the attention of the person that you're talking to so it does seem to be narrating stories telling stories making a narrative of out of events seems to be inherent human so we're hardwired to do it well language makes us do it are we hardwired to speak yeah we hardwired to make sentences yeah I would say so so the next step is anecdotes and this next step after that is stories do you think everybody has a story to tell just because they have language as long as they desire to tell it they don't desire to tell it they don't have a story to tell but that makes okay so imagine that you're reading one a set of those hack novels those hack murder mystery novels that they used to write in the 30s I used to have one that I bought that was an old horse racing murder mystery novel and the cover had a sort of semi dressed woman and a couple of guns and the and it was set on the horse racing track and it was called win lose or die but if you were writing those if you're reading a bunch of those hack novels and you are used to them you can tell that different writers have written them even though they have the same name of the person who employs them to write it because they pay attention to different things they there they plot it in slightly different ways they focus on slightly different motives and so in my experience of reading the the the thing that every novel have every novelist has is idiosyncrasy what you really have to make sure to get into your novel is not who you are but whether you can make the story gripping or not and so I think for for decades authors are forever offers these authors have been saying for themselves I want to be original I want to be original you are original what you want to be is compelling and the originality comes with it what's the difference story well you can be compelling and nonsensical I mean you can be original and nonsensical at the same time you can be original and not know how to form the story and make it work and and keep track of the characters and all of that you can you can be original mmm-hmm and still and the readers gonna be scratching her head and saying but I don't understand this at all yeah hand me a book this the reader readers greatest the readers greatest right and privilege when he or she is reading a book is to say this is bull toss on the side and the writer has to know that the writer has to know that the reader can always look away and so the writer has to draw the reader in in some way yeah you've got this great line where you said what is difficult is not to write something new this is precisely what you were just saying but to write something interesting and true so true in the eyes of the reader yeah yes okay that's what I was gonna ask you explain what do you mean by that so so the the reader just has to be able to suspend his or her disbelief to go with you yes I mean I think you have to be true to yourself and true to your own imagination and there's a lot of ways to do that for example if I decide I'm gonna write um let's say I decided I was going to rewrite King Lear let's just say but when I when I finally decided that I could do that that I'd had that spark of inspiration the spark of inspiration was about setting the setting that inspired me was a place in northern Iowa called the pothole Prairie and we were driving south on i-35 from Minneapolis and it was late in the afternoon and in about March or sometimes some damp dark depressing right and I remember we were driving along and I was looking around and I said I wasn't driving thank God I was looking around he was driving I said you know this is where I should set that lear book and bingo there was it all came to me and what came to me was the setting I knew what the pothole Prairie was the pothole Prairie had been a big marshy swampy area and and farmers from eastern England who were familiar because they were from Norfolk they were familiar with swamps and so they came and they drained it and of course they it was incredibly fertile this land but they didn't realize that within 50 years there would be a lot of pesticides and that the pesticides would be running from the land down through the drainage the drainage wells and then into the groundwater and then back up to them sure so they didn't realize that and they just couldn't believe the fertility that they found there so they became wealthy in a way that maybe people over by Sioux City didn't immediately become mm-hmm so so that was the inspiration and then everything sort of popped out from that inspiration you know that story I thought was so intrigued we're talking about a thousand acres which for which you won the Pulitzer Prize but you tell it from one of the daughters points of view well when I said this is where I'm gonna set that leer novel I was talking about I'd known for years that I wanted the daughters Goneril and Regan to say what their side of the story was because I remember even from the first time I read King Lear in high school I was annoyed that they didn't get to say anything and and Lear just kept babbling on and on and on complain complain complain complain complain now I came from the st. Louis family and say it Louis we didn't complain you've had a fight or you made a joke but you didn't go blab blab that even if you were the patriarch and the family and so so I wasn't used to that I later realized that yeah uncle bill had to do that because it was on stage and so how were the characters going to express their inner lives except by talking but you know it took me a really long time to put that together and and one of the things I always loved about the novel was that the novelist who ever was you know could Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or George Eliot could go into the mind of the character without the character having to talk and there's a great moment in Dickens career where he does that and it's in Dombey and son which is I love the tambien Sun and there's a character in Dombey and son whose name is mr. Carter the manager and he never says anything and he's always smiling and so the people around him don't know what he's planning and that was the first Dickens novel where he realized that he could go into the mind of mr. Carter the manager and tell the reader what the what he was thinking without mr. Carter seeing what he was thinking and if you go back even a few years before that to justine by the marquis de sade the all the people who who justine meets up with and who torture her and a torturer lots of other people decide hasn't figured out how to go into their minds and say why they're doing it so they're always blabbering on to justine about why they do this and why they do that and why they're corrupt and why they're gonna torture her to death you know you think the real torture for her would be just yeah just listen you know that but but that's because desaad hadn't figured out that particular way of telling the story and a right around the 1830s people you know Brit European novelists began to realize that's how to do it and and that pushed the novel into another realm so let's let's keep going with your with your work for a minute you you have made some of your novels so complicated with the characters that even you had to create charts why I didn't create the charts the publisher created the charts no I'm saying for you to even keep track I thought you would put like well I kept a chart in mu because mu is the one that takes place at a land-grant University and I knew that I wanted to talk about a lot of people in the university the thing I had to keep track of was were the were they showing up enough so the chart I made was a grid with the number of the chapters across the top and the names of the characters down the side and all I did was if they showed up in a particular chapter I would check off the ones who showed up and then I would look at the grid and see who was missing and then I also knew that every so often I had to have a lot of them so there had to be a party so they had to show up at a party but for example with the last hundred years trilogy um I never got any of them mixed up I knew that the reader would and that the publisher knew that the reader would but for me that it was like members of your family why would you ever get any of them mixed up they're so weird and so so much themselves you know in that hundred year trilogy you described a baby I think the character is Frank yeah Frank's the first baby yeah you describe him in this you're it's almost like you're in his head but but then watching him develop and grow up it makes total sense what you just said of course he wouldn't lose track because the the he was consistent all the way through but I I was just really admiring your ability to describe how a baby acts and reacts and I had three babies you know and that and I'll never forget my when the when the second one was born and the doctor put her in my arms I knew instantly that she was different from the first one just by the way that she relaxed the first one remained this kind of self-contained package and and she was and she continues to be self-contained to this day and so she was four years old when the when the second one was born they're both girls and so I I knew the first one really well and then the doctor handed me the second one and I said this is a different this is a different kid different experience and she was completely different and in in all the things it didn't matter what baby books I was reading none of them said okay they're born with an inherent temperament they're born with an inherent way of being a way of inherent way of perceiving the world and you have to take that into consideration they just said trainer this way trainer that way trainer this way trainer that way didn't work and so that was part of the inspiration for starting with Frank's infancy because I wanted to show the difference between Frank and the brothers and everybody else so one of the things that I noticed in in your novels that is I think fairly consistent throughout is almost always what crumbles is a good marriage there are some marriages name a good marriage that crumbles well thousand acres I mean the the main character Jenny yeah okay you know you don't think sleeping with Jess it contributes to something and then her moving away that's not a crumbling marriage but but this this happens throughout your novels well I've had many a crumbling marriage all right right but the last hundred years is dedicated to my four husband yeah all of your husband's exactly I was going to bring that up eventually but thanks yeah all of your husband's and then you've got this you've got this line that but it isn't just about marriage it's about families in in general that I just thought was so disturbing where where it says when the main character when my father asserted his point of view mine vanished not even I could remember it I've seen a lot of families like that and what's that from thousand acres okay so I always say about a thousand acres uncle bill told me to do it so that way she shakes first yeah uncle bill Shakespeare mhm that line all of the stuff might my goal in a thousand acres when I set out to do it was to adhere to the plot of King Lear as closely as I could and still make a plausible in an hour day which meant I did there couldn't be a war so I decided because of his Iowa there also couldn't be a gun battle and there would have to be legal stuff that was the only way I tried very hard to make that the only way that I veered away from the play at one point I did lose track of what I was supposed to be doing I had to go back about half an act and and follow it and make it adhere to the play but that was my game but the question if I was going to talk about everything from Goneril and Regan point of view especially goneril's point of view then I had to filter the play and Larry and and and Lear through Ginny's mind and I figured if if Lear was the king and given the way he acts in the play that he was probably pretty domineering the whole time they were growing up and not only the episodes of incest that are included but just his attitude was was to tell them what to do and to make sure they did it and yeah we all everybody my age knew somebody who had those parents I didn't have those parents but everybody knew somebody who did okay the very authoritarian authoritative parents and so the lines in there aren't meant to be my thinking they're meant to be jennice or especially Jenny but sometimes Rosa's things okay but but your own father the essay you wrote about your father where yes PTSD not very present it wasn't present at all exactly god I mean okay why right well my father was the Pratt I think he had pts I don't I don't know that he had PTSD but I think he was schizophrenic or else he had what's that other disease that they called bipolar bipolar disorder and it was evident and my mother and he lived in LA and my family lived in st. Louis and his family lived in Michigan and it was evident from short time after my birth to my grandmother who came for a visit to see me but increasingly to my mother that he he was hearing voices and he was not understanding what he was supposed to be doing and so finally they they came back that they were going to go from LA to Michigan to see his family and they got as far as Wyoming and and he couldn't drive anymore because he was hearing the voices so much and so my mother took me back to st. Louis to live with her parents and then she went back and forth between st. Louis and Michigan to see if something could be done but he came and I had a talk with some of his nick nieces and nephews a few years ago cousins of mine on the phone his side and they said everybody in the family was crazy that there and there was a large start strong authoritarian streak in the family and so when I look back on that I think the best thing that ever happened to me was that I got to live with my mother's family which had their moments but we're generally good natured and affectionate and and funny and and playful instead of living with the crazy shirts so yeah that's what all I wanted to say in that essay the the S but that essay was just so moving where where you you show that your mother had aspirations to be a writer in this essay you say but he told her that writing was for second-rate Minds his ideal piece of written work exactly the Army Field Manual right nothing could measure up to that is what he said and it's I mean she told me this he didn't do me this but it was because it was very organized he didn't see the novel or literature as a thing that was organized and precise and that probably fits in with mental issues because he could maybe maybe I don't know but maybe he could find it get it find himself getting lost in emotions when he's reading a novel and you can't get lost in emotions when you're reading the army he was at West Point but he he he didn't do well but in the Army but that was he aspired to do well in the army I in in the way you were raised I you've got this really interesting perspective where where you said that his absence and your mother's distraction freed you from being raised with a lot of preconceptions and then then you've got this is a direct quote from something you wrote sometimes from the outside my work and my life looked daring but I'm not a daring person I think as a writer I think you were pretty daring well but why not you're sitting in your office you're playing around with your materials you have things going through your mind and you want to try this and you want to try that and it's so much fun to play around the fit and so you just try it and the the sense of pleasure in creating whatever it is gets in the way of worrying oh my god what's it you know and you know some of the books appeared airing from the outside like ten days in the Hills which is based on completely different kind of work novel of yours and that's based because after 9/11 I decided I was going to read a lot of books from a long time ago to get my mind away from 9/11 so the first one I read was the tale of genji which was a thousand years old I figured what could be farther away from 9/11 than this except that it was all about the ephemerality of existence and so I thought oh dear okay I'll try something else so then I picked up the Decameron which I'd heard of but never read by Giovanni Boccaccio my goodness is set in the Black Death every and this is around the time that those envelopes were going around with the director going around and so there was a lot of anxiety about that and here are these ten people outside of Florence in the middle of the Black Death trying to distract themselves from what's happening all around them I thought that's really that's really fascinating and I loved sort of the exuberance of the stories and I loved the fact that Boccaccio had taken a lot of the stories from the hit opah Desha which is which was actually Indian rather than European and so then I was casting around for the next one and I never heard of this one before and it was the hep tamarin by Marguerite of Nev I didn't even know who Marguerite of Navarre was so I had heard of her brother Francois the fur and so I started reading the HEPT hammer-on and I was absolutely captivated because she had decided she and her friends were stuck in code array and the Pyrenees in a spa and and they couldn't get out because of floods and so she decided she was gonna rewrite the Decameron which was you know 2200 years old now and so she rewrote it as they have tamarind and she said my two favorite rules for telling a bunch of stories and the first rule was every story had to be true and the second rule which it so so it had to be gossip it had to be about the people they knew and the second rule was it had to be about every story had to be about whether a young woman could know true love and retain her virtue and so they they collected they told I don't know how many stories they told but seventy-three stories were collected which is why it's called the hep Tamara and some were funny and some were scary and some were interesting and then they talked a lot about the stories after they were finished telling them much more than they had in Boccaccio and that was because the counter-reformation had come along the Reformation the counter-reformation had come along and so they had learned to investigate their own ideas and thoughts and feelings a little more and so at the end of the heptamer on they decided no a young woman could not know true love and virtue at the same time and then about a hundred years later one of the next books I read this is all post-911 reading yeah one of the next books I read was the princess of clev by Madame de Lafayette which is still a book they read in French schools and the great thing about that is that she knew about the hep tamarin and she decided she was going to solve the riddle and so she solved the virtue yes she did she got the woman to know true love but still her virtue but in a very characteristic way sort of 67th sees me 17th century way and as soon as I read all those books I thought the novel is really interesting as a historical form as a form where it asks the reader to look within where it says the reader you have an inner life and the more that you read about other people's inner lives then the bigger your inner life gets so finally when you get to a book like Orlando by Virginia Woolf she has Orlando has such who who goes back and forth over the years and between male and female and that character has a huge in her life and there's nothing that ever stops her from saying from paying attention to her own in her life or his own in her life and enjoying it and that to me is what the novel is for it's for cultivating a child's in her life so that when the child is sitting you know she's sitting there minding her manners but she's looking at the family saying she's keeping her face straight these people are crazy and I'm gonna write a book about it yeah but but did that reading all of those really deep and historical works did that help you in some way get through the the trauma of 9/11 well it inspired me I mean how did we get through the trauma of 9/11 for a lot of writers the thing that they were working on when 9/11 happened made whatever 9/11 made whatever they were working on just looked tiny and worthless mm-hmm and so for me to go and read all those other books and to understand the events that those authors had lived through mm-hmm it put 9/11 in perspective really I'm gonna say to Giovanni Boccaccio well 9/11 is more important than the Black Death know you know so reading how all of those other authors had processed the worlds that they lived in and the the traumas that they lived through was very helpful to me and I got more excited and interested the more that I read them I didn't set out to write 13 ways but I started reading those books and I just had to I had to do it because it was so interesting well and even before you get to your summaries of those novels the first part of 13 ways is some of the best writing advice I've ever read it was just really really helpful and and clear in there though you you make some mention of having some sort of a spiritual awakening or some sort of a crisis or whatever did that help or hurt your writing well it helped what happened was I found my current husband and he was a follower of a course in miracles and I didn't grow up in a religious family and I'd never been a follower of anything but he really liked it so I thought okay cooking him dinner is only gonna go so far if he's really into this out I'll see what I in the course of miracles was like a is anybody heard of A Course in Miracles oh yeah you explain to him what it is no I I know what it is I just I mean I I hadn't until I read your reference so I went back and read up on what it what it was but so it helped you well we read we read there's food that you start out there's a bunch of lessons and then there's a kind of rewriting of the Bible that is the Course in Miracles and and when and then when you first open it you think this is a bunch of gobbledygook just gobbledygook mm-hmm and and then but it's but as you get into it certain things seem seem true and one of the things that has stuck with me all these years is one of the principles of the course which is I give everything all the meaning that it has for me and that's a novelist precept if ever there was one because that's my job as a novelist to give to take the world around me and give it meaning and put it on the page so I accepted that and we would do the lessons and I thought some of the other stuff was interesting too for example there's a there's a part about what was Jesus actually doing when Jesus was being crucified well the real Jesus was standing across the hillside watching the illusionary Jesus be crucified because this world is an illusion that's a Course in Miracles precept mmm-hmm and after we'd been doing it for about together and it worked and I'm not gonna say whether the course works better than getting him dinner a lot but they were to get they melded together perfectly then so I finally thought well okay maybe I can participate in this sort of religion thing after having no religion in my life and and then they started having these huge arguments about who owned the text and who got the money and I thought there they go yep just killed it just killed it there being like all those other religions it's about who says the right thing and who gets the money so let's let's wrap this up this way thinking about the the advice you gave in 13 ways not everybody's gonna read that book so let's distill your best writing advice for the people in the audience and the people who are going to be watching this okay there are there are some people who want to know I want to I want to write and I want to write better what do you tell them well 13 ways is about writing writing novels right but there's but there's some bigger things that you can apply to just writing in general in there well I guess the main thing is first of all you have to be good with language you have to know how to punctuate you have to know how to write the sentence you have to know how to spell because it's like if you can't if you aren't good with language and don't teach yourself to be good with language then all these little mistakes are like a little pebble in your shoe they'll make the whole thing much more of an effort then then you want it to be but what if you're not good at those things you have to practice and learn okay you have to practice and learn because the drug there's a pyramid in 13 ways and this is the pyramid of the novel and the bottom layer of the pyramid is language and that's where the door is and you have to be able to walk in that door and be at ease in there now the best way one of the best ways is to read read read read read when you're reading you become much better at writing too because you you the language goes into you and comes out read anything anything graphic novels the Bobbsey Twins and Bobbsey Twins the other thing that you have to have is is patience you have to train yourself to be patient with yourself and know that your main job is to just finish this novel once you finish the novel or whatever the book is that you're going to write and toss it out into the world you don't know what's gonna happen to it you hope something good is going to happen to it but in my class today at UC Riverside I'm teaching an immigrant novel class and the novel we were reading today was the worry the woman warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston which I quite enjoy but one of the things we talked about for most of our session was the reaction in the Chinese American community when the book came out and the reaction was very negative because they felt that Maxine Hong Kingston had kowtow to American ideas of what it should mean to be Chinese and that's often true in immigrant communities where you read a lot a lot of books are more popular out in the world than they are with the community that the woman or the man is a part of who's writing it so you have to be patient so I'm sure that Maxine Hong Kingston had no idea she was going to be such a huge big deal and then I'm sure afterwards she thought hmm I wonder if that was okay to be such a huge big deal but you have no control over that so you have to send it out and then turn away from it and go on to the next thing and then my my third piece of advice is you have to find pleasure in the process which means that putting together the plot putting together the characters putting together looking around putting the setting on the page those things have to please you and you have to enjoy those because those are the only lasting pleasures every every award you get every book review you get it's gone hmm but if you sit down at your desk every day and you get involved even the book that I had the hardest time with the one where I decided I was going to commit suicide so that they would publish it [Laughter] only do that but when I when I would sit I had real problems with it and when I would sit down and go over it I would feel frustrated but I couldn't help myself I would feel fascinated by how I'm gonna fix this how I'm going to fix this how am I gonna make it right and I couldn't keep myself away from it and so that that turned out to be a pleasure a frustrating pleasure but also a pleasure because I just couldn't leave it alone which book was it I'm not telling come on we're gonna end with the mystery Jane smiley thank you for being with us [Applause] [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 2,189

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

Keywords: A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley, Dean Nelson, Point Loma Nazarene, Writer's Symposium

Id: P2b97sj3HXs

Length: 59min 7sec (3547 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2018