When I get up in the morning, the first two questions I have to answer are “What’s for dinner?” and “When should I go to the barn?” The rest of the day revolves around these important issues. The work will, of course, get done—at the moment I have two literary tasks. The first of these is to go over the copy-edited manuscript of my novel Some Luck, to be published in October of 2014 (I am trying to talk them into publishing it on my birthday, September 26th). The second is to read more Gary Shteyngart, in preparation for an interview I am doing with him, on stage in LA in mid-January. I am not writing anything just now—when I finish going over copy-edits, I will do a final rewrite of my novel Early Warning, a sequel to Some Luck, which is scheduled for April 2015. Both are part of a trilogy entitled The Last Hundred Years, which tracks the lives of three generations of an Iowa family, beginning in 1920 and ending in 2019. I am quite fond of it, especially of the characters, who I love but get to torment, and Knopf is enthusiastic also. Along with the copy-edited manuscript came a mock up of the cover. It is elegant and alluring—the best sort of cover.

It may be that tonight we will have left-overs. In the refrigerator are half a meatloaf, some matzoh ball soup, and the remains of last night’s extremely delicious pork chops. And tomorrow is a cooking day—because we were out of town on Christmas, we are having a belated Christmas dinner—turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, stuffing made from Whole Foods crostini, roasted Brussels sprouts, sugar cookies, and two kinds of ice cream. The guests will be a mix of steps, exes, and friends—this is California, everyone is welcome. Even so, I would like to cook something tonight. I would always like to cook something. This morning I made scones (no eggs is the key). I added a little too much milk, but they turned out beautifully brown and crisp. Maybe tomorrow morning, one will be leftover to split and put in the toaster.

It is a beautiful day, but of a sinister kind—we should have had more rain by now—this is the worst drought since 1949, the year I was born. There has already been a fire down in Big Sur—we missed it because we were in Europe, but the smoke was bad, and the omen for the rest of the season worse. After lunch, I will go to the barn (which is about a mile away). On the way there, I will stare at the brown hillsides and recall that last year, and the year before that, they were green by now, brilliant against the blue sky. I will worry about the hay supply and wonder if this is the year….

The year for what? I am sixty-four, and I have been wondering if this is the year for something since I was old enough to worry. Worrying has been a fruitful inspiration for me. The Last Hundred Years is full of worriers. My favorite character, a beautiful girl from Decorah, Iowa, has been worried sick since she was four, when her older cousin described to her in exquisite detail the drowning of a neighbor boy in a local pond. Of all the characters in the trilogy, this one is my favorite. She is not me, but she is part of me.

At the barn, I will take Ned, the six-year-old, down to the big arena and let him run around. He hasn’t done much in the last few weeks, so he is full of beans. He will kick up and squeal and gallop like the Thoroughbred he is, and he will make the circuit of the ring maybe six or eight times, top speed. Then he will stop and walk over to me, indicating that he is back to normal, and ready for a cube of sugar. Ned knows a few tricks—to come to the whistle, to turn left or right on command, to find a treat and eat it when told to do so. He has learned to be careful with his lips—to gently explore the top of the post or the mounting block with his lips until he senses the sugar, then to take it carefully so as to not knock it to the ground. Tomorrow, I might ride Ned.

When I am finished with Ned, I may ride Jackie, the old guy, but since I am just recovering from a bad cold, I might not push myself too hard, and instead come home and read.

I read a lot, mostly from my Kindles (one old-style, for slipping into a ziplock and reading in the hot tub, one Kindle Fire for reading in the dark). I have also been reading Shteyngart’s new book, a memoir called Little Failure, in hard cover. While I was in Europe, I read Absurdistan and Anthony Trollope’s The Kellys and the O’Kellys. The other day, I started Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and yes he is right—things used to be a lot worse, which doesn’t mean I can stop worrying. I have a reading chair, which is really a couch. Sometimes the Labradoodle lies across me and I rest the Kindle against her fluffy coat.

After dinner, we will watch a movie. There are about thirty on the DVR. Last night we tried Rome, Open City and Teen Wolf. Watched each for a half an hour then deleted. For me, it is only a knitting opportunity—I am about two-thirds finished with the back of a sweater for my husband, green light-weight cotton yarn from Greece with a little cabling. My son and my husband’s son are home for vacation. They come and go, eat something or find a restaurant, gossip or play video games. It is refreshing to have them around, and when we go to bed, we pretend that, if they aren’t back yet, we aren’t worried. They are both in their twenties now. On their own.  Dogs in bed. Good night.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• I don’t think in terms of bests, just in terms of whether I enjoy it or not. I don’t think novels can be compared because every reader’s response is unique. I committed to a project for the Anthony Trollope Society that involved rereading He Knew He Was Right and The Kelly’s and the O’Kelly’s. I loved them both all over again, because of Trollope’s great ability to enter into the minds and feelings of all sorts of characters, including women characters.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Keep at it. Novelists are tortoises, not hares.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I don’t know, because I don’t know what is normal. I am reliant on Diet Coke…

By Jane Smiley

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

January 1, 2014: Jane Smiley

I’ve been reading Jane Smiley books for seventeen years, since October of 1997, when I found Duplicate Keys on a table at Powell’s on a trip to Portland. At that point, Jane had already been publishing books for seventeen years, since 1980, starting with her novel, Barn Blind. I’m still reading Jane Smiley books. And she’s still writing them.

Thirteen novels. One short story collection. Five books of nonfiction. Five young adult novels.

A Thousand Acres, her sixth novel and an ode to King Lear, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was also made into a movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer.

After Jane wrote Horse Heaven, her ninth novel, she began Good Faith, about which she wrote:

It was like dating someone new who was nice enough but not nearly as exciting as the old boyfriend who had moved to Europe.

And late in the writing of Good Faith, she closed the file on her computer and walked away.

“But that was very bad,” she wrote. Instead of finishing her novel, she decided to read a hundred novels. No magic in her choice of titles. “[A]lmost any list of a hundred serious novels would illuminate that concept.” The culmination of her reading those hundred books was her book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane wrote about her process up to that point (2006):

I’d written twelve finished works. I’d had fourteen ideas. The two that did not make it into print were a novella about a woman who is married to a jazz musician (I wrote a rough draft, but when I reread it, it didn’t seem to have a point), and a novella about a horse-riding Realtor (sixty pages that just kept expanding with no actual story).

(Speaking of novellas, I highly recommend Jane’s novella The Age of Grief, followed by Robin Black‘s essay on secondary characters.)

Some writers have a particular writing process on which they rely for every book they write. (Ann Patchett comes to mind. I believe she has the whole story in her head each time before she sits down to write.) On the other hand, I’m writing my current novel in an entirely different way than my previous ones, which were written in diverse ways. Back in 2006, Jane wrote about the contrasting ways she had written her novels (and novella) thus far:

I had experienced every form of literary creation I had ever heard of–patient construction (A Thousand Acres), joyous composition (Moo, Horse Heaven), the grip of inspiration that seems to come from elsewhere (The Greenlanders), steady composition (Duplicate Keys), systematic putting together (Barn Blind), word-intoxicated buzz (The Age of Grief), even disinterested professional dedication (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton).

I wanted to leave you with a passage from one of Jane’s novels. It was hard to choose, but I settled on A Thousand Acres. I narrowed it down to Chapter 4, which if you’re looking for a chapter to study for structure, I suggest this one. Here’s the way it opens–with the land, using comparison to give the reader information about Ginny’s (the narrator’s) father’s land.

Harold’s place looked much like ours, flat as flat, though the house was more Victorian in style, with sunrise gable finishes and a big porch swing in front. Harold didn’t have as much land as my father…

Then there’s a scene on the back porch, where the father unveils a new plan for running the farm. Here are the three daughters’ responses:

I tried to sound agreeable. “It’s a good idea.”
Rose said, “It’s a great idea.”
Caroline said, “I don’t know.”

Ginny breaks away from the scene to recall her earliest memories of her father and how she tries to understand him. A page later, the scene resumes.

When my father turned his head to look at Caroline, his movement was slow and startled, a big movement of the whole body, reminding me how bulky he was–well over six feet and two hundred thirty pounds.

The father responds and walks away. Ginny thinks:

It would be no use telling him that she had only said that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t turned him down, that she had expressed a perfectly reasonable doubt…

There’s a kitchen scene with Ginny and another character. Then the chapter comes to a close in Ginny and Ty’s bedroom, where Ginny sits in the window seat.

Undoubtedly, each of us interpreted my father’s announcement as the answer to some wish or fear of ours.

Finally, there’s a one-page summary of Ginny and Ty’s struggle to have a baby. And the following stunning passage, grounded in sensory details, concludes this chapter, lifting us further into the story.

Beyond Rose’s hours, my father’s windows, too, were dark. I realized that I hadn’t thought to ask if I needed to go over and get his breakfast in the morning. That was something Rose and I generally agreed upon each night. When Caroline was staying, she liked to do it, but she had gone home with Rose after my father left the party. I opened the window and squinted through the screen. I was sure I could see his truck parked by the barn, Pete’s truck parked next to their porch, the roof of our truck, below, glinting in pearly peach. The summer sounds of bullfrogs and cicadas hadn’t begun yet, but a breeze was soughing through the pines north of the house, the hogs were clanking their feeders in the barn. It was the same calm and safe vista that was nine every night–the one that I sometimes admitted to myself I’d been afraid to leave when high school was over and the question of doing something else came up. It suited me, and it was easy to felt it claim me every night, but I had wishes, too, secret, passionate wishes, and as I sat there enjoying the heavy, moist breeze, I let myself think, maybe this is it, maybe this is what turns the tide, and carries the darling child into shore.

Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how JANE SMILEY spends her days.