JANE SMILEY: One thing I would say is that an addiction is something that you can't wait to do, but you don't feel good afterwards, and a passion is something that maybe you are lazy about, but you feel really good afterwards. So I would say that for me, writing is a passion, rather than an addiction. So you know, I get up and do it, the way any other person gets up and does their work. But I do enjoy it. Which is not to say that it always goes well. In my book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, I talk about some of the reasons that it doesn't go well. And they're usually traceable to something very specific, if you can get rid of the panic part. They're usually traceable to, either confusion about how the narrative is shaping up, or ignorance about the material, or disappointment in how the material looks compared to other things that you've read. And so, if you don't panic, if you don't say, oh, shit, I have writer's block, you know, if you don't label it, and worry about it, then you'll find a way out of it. My general way out of it is to go read something about that thing that I'm ignorant about. That's said, it does vary from book to book. The thing that is difficult varies from book to book. For example, the current book I'm writing has a lot of information, and is about life 100 years ago. And also has the figure of a scientist in it, and so it has to be plausible-- I have to be able to write plausibly about what he would say. It never goes into his point of view, so not really about what he would think. So I have to get a lot of information about stuff that really I don't know anything about. So with this book, I have to say, I've got Wikipedia on the desktop all the time. But with Ten Days in the Hills, the last book I wrote, the difficulty was not information or ignorance, it was having a, kind of, plot-like or structural-like spine to the book. So that I could write and write and write and write, but I didn't really know from day to day, until I went back through the second draft, what actually was happening among the characters. So in this case, I know all the things that's happened. I don't know what they mean. In that case, I knew what everything meant, but I really didn't know what happened. So they both have their difficulties. But you can always come back to them later. You don't have to solve them in the first draft.