Francine Prose Again

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Here's another passage from Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer," in which she describes one tactic for getting unstuck from one's own sense of inadequacy as a writer:

"To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own---a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art."

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