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.
Interpretation
Life involves moving from ignorance to understanding, and writing allows us to share that journey.
In this quote, Jane Smiley reflects on the nature of life as a constant journey of growth and learning, suggesting that as we move from foolishness to wisdom, we also gain insights that are worth sharing. Writing novels becomes a means to communicate these experiences, illustrating the different phases of our understanding and the wisdom we acquire along the way.
In practice
Using this quote in a writing workshop to inspire authors sharing their personal journeys.
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.
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.
Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
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.
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.
Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.
Such is the state of every age, every sex, and every condition: all have their cares, either from nature or from folly; and whoever, therefore, finds himself inclined to envy another, should remember that he knows not the real condition which he desires to obtain, but is certain that by indulging a vicious passion, he must lessen that happiness which he thinks already too sparingly bestowed.
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
Job never saw why he suffered, but he saw God, and that was enough.
I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same.
A person will gain everyone's approval if he mixes the pleasant with the useful.
Wait for the idea. It may not come at first, but you must be patient, never doubting, waiting in faith. It will come.
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