A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
Interpretation
A novelist experiences life in two ways: through reading and writing, and through their personal lived experiences.
Jane Smiley's quote highlights the dual existence of a novelist, emphasizing that their creative work is deeply intertwined with both their literary consumption and their personal experiences. To understand a novelist fully, one must recognize that their insights and narratives are shaped by their engagement with literature as well as the reality they observe and live within. This interconnection underscores the complexity of a writer's perspective, revealing how life and art are collaborators in the novel-writing process.
In practice
During a writer's workshop to illustrate the dual life of a novelist.
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.
What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.
Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful, That's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.
People really feel like music is free but will pay $6 for water. You can drink water free out of the tap, and it's good water. But they're OK paying for it.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.
The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
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