Jane Smiley, On Two Types of Novelists

00:08 [Jane Smiley] I think some people tend to be more perfectionist than others, and some people tend to be sloppier than others. And both ways of doing things have their advantages. The novel is an interesting form because it repays both abundance and perfection, but not in the same book.

00:30 You can take a book like Persuasion by Jane Austen, and you can say, well, this book is pretty perfect. Can't think of anything wrong with this book. Or Pride and Prejudice, or a few other books. Or you can take another book like Middlemarch by George Eliot and say, this book is incredibly abundant, but it's not perfect. This section could be better or this section could be shorter or whatever. But both

01:00 novels have wonderful things to offer. My feeling is that a book can't be perfect and abundant at the same time. You could say that if you're temperamentally one of the sloppy ones, then perhaps your goal is abundance. If you're temperamentally one of the careful ones, then your goal is perfection. You can try to have the other. The other thing about the novel is that

01:30 it tends to reproduce the mind of the author fairly distinctly, or the best mind of the author. It doesn't necessarily reproduce the guy who gets up in the morning, yells at the kids, drinks too many cups of coffee, gets in the shower, you know. But it tends to reproduce the way he thinks, the way his mind works when he's

02:00 focused on something, in terms of writing style, in terms of choices about character or theme or whatever, setting or whatever. So because it does reproduce the mind of the author, that means that the author -- it's very hard for any author to break out of his own idiosyncrasies. It's very hard for an abundance sort of author to become a perfectionist, or a perfectionist sort of author to become

02:30 an abundance sort of author, which is fine because that means that every book, every novel, every good novel is unique, is itself, and therefore we appreciate it for that very reason.