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Jane Smiley

kbaron

Jane Smiley is the author of thirteen novels, including "A Thousand Acres," which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, four works of nonfiction, and a horse book for young adults. She has two more works coming out this year, "A Good Horse," the second in the horse book series, and "The Man Who Invented the Computer," a biography of John Vincent Atanasoff, the first volume Sloane Foundation American Inventers series. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 2006. Her newest adult novel, "Private Life," is a fictional account of the tumultuous life of a Midwestern woman from the 1880s to World War II. Several of the book's characters are based on figures from Smiley's own family tree.

Where Did That Come From?

Inspiration for characters can be as complicated as people themselves.

August 30, 2010
Source: Getty Images

Writers have to decide who in their lives is fair game for subject matter, and all writers decide differently. The fact is, that when you are starting out, everyone is fair game, because you don't know how to construct a character, and an easy way (as Virginia Woolf discovered when she was writing The Voyage Out) is to thinly disguise your relatives and acquaintances.

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What’s So Funny?

How bad can things be if we are bound to look back and laugh at them later in life?

August 23, 2010
Source: Getty Images

My mother was ahead of her time in several ways, and one of them was that when I was a small child, she was a professional working woman and single parent. She had a vocation, an office at the newspaper, lots of sophisticated friends, and because she was the woman's page editor, she dressed in chic ensembles every working day. This was a very good model for me as a future woman, but the grand benefit for me as a child was that I stayed with my grandparents during the day, and went to their local elementary school.

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Where Did My Life Begin?

What shapes our lives? It’s not always easy to know.

August 16, 2010
Source: Getty Images

Some years ago, I wrote a short biography of Charles Dickens for a series. Long after I had finished it, I came across a similar work for an earlier series by English writer Angus Wilson. I read it attentively, and was amused to discover that Wilson had cherry-picked the voluminous Dickens information almost exactly as I had; he was struck by the same episodes, and even used some of the same quotes.

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Do it Your Way

To get the behavior you want, sometimes it's best to simply let go

Source: Getty Images

Those who have read my novel Horse Heaven or my non-fiction book A Year At the Races know that part of our extended family is made up of horses that I bred and have trained or help train since foalhood.

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