My favorite thing to remember about novel-writing is an observation I saw taped to a friend's wall in her office in graduate school: "Nobody asked you to write that novel". Therefore novel-writing is a choice--you can always stop, always keep going. You are free to do whatever you want. Most novelists come to writing novels because they have been avid readers. Almost all novels, because they are capacious and hard to contain, are imperfect. Normally, "perfect" and "ambitious" cannot co-exist in the same novel. Therefore, most readers have plenty of opinions about how even a wonderful, beloved, and thrilling novel might be made just a little better. And so we try it. And we discover that it is both harder and easier than it looks.

Jane Smiley