“On the Art of Fiction” by Alice McDermott (post 3) 

McDermott discusses a number of writers’ works that I have also discussed, but I’ll mention just two: Henry James’s story “The Middle Years” (1, p. 186), famous for his phrase “the madness of art,” and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography (1, p. 217).

Search “madness of art” to read my post on the James character’s plural self-reference. Search “Nabokov autobiography” to read his extensive descriptions of his memory gaps and dissociative fugues.

At the conclusion of McDermott’s book on the art of fiction, she says:

“If you can do anything else, I tell aspiring writers now, if you can do anything other than pursue this literary fiction thing and still sleep at night and wake joyful in the morning and know that the hours of your days have been well spent, then you should do that—that other thing. The beauty of the advice is how quickly it clarifies, for some of us, what we’ve always known: Of course we can’t. We can’t” (1, p. 237).

Perhaps there is something about the fiction writer’s mind which inclines them to that kind of creativity.

1. Alice McDermott. What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2021.