And then the words don’t come.

I’ve talked with many writers about their writing processes, not out of a desire to emulate them but out of curiosity. What do they do when the brain isn’t working and the sentences don’t arrive elegant and ready-made onto the screen? Everyone has a different answer, but the one I hear most often is that they tune out all distractions and hunker down until sentience finally crashes through whatever barrier the brain has erected and the words start to flow. They turn on Internet blocking software, which is the modern-day writer’s equivalent of barring the garret door and stuffing plugs into each ear canal. For the specified amount of time, these writers are in a procrastination-free zone, their surfing privileges revoked, in an attempt to meet their daily word count.

Apparently, this strategy works for them, and I’m glad it does. But this is what I do when good ideas and interesting plot developments play their cutthroat game of hide and seek with me: I take a break. Those are the moments when I need the Internet, or just about any other handy distraction, to take my mind off my inability to innovate. I check the baseball scores. I read a review of a film I want to see. I feed the cat. I go on Twitter and talk with friends about jazz or novels or poetry. Anything to help me forget that the perfect word is up there in the literary firmament and I can’t reach it.

It’s the darnedest thing: More often than not, after I’ve allowed myself two or five or thirty minutes to goof off, I go back to my manuscript, and there’s that word I was looking for, or the plot twist that moves the story in a more satisfying direction. It was in front of me all along. All I needed was to stop hunting for it for a while. All I needed was to allow myself to break my concentration and succumb to the allure of distractions.

Each writer has to find his or her method of working. The ultimate goal is to produce your best work. If blocking out the rest of the planet for hours on end is what works for you, then that’s what you should do. But I think some of us need to give ourselves permission to step out of the narrative, whether of a novel or a book review (or a blog post), and do other things when the magic isn’t happening. The agent Betsy Lerner once wrote that you could have all of Versailles to yourself and still not be able to write well if the ideas aren’t flowing. She’s right. All the more reason, then, to get up from your desk once in a while and check out the paintings or the Hall of Mirrors, to savor the beauty around you, until the ideas for your own contribution emerge from behind their hiding place.

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Actually, he doesn’t see the insomnia. But he does see the stacks of printouts and the backed-up files and the ideas for future stories scribbled on legal pads. We write when he’s at school or asleep, but occasionally we need to edit when he’s around. That means he’s been a witness to Daddy’s mad dashes toward his laptop to type up a good idea before the idea disappears forever, and Mommy revising her ninth draft during his bath time.

Fortunately, none of this appears to have put him off books. On the contrary: His favorite activities, along with building Lego sphinxes with yellow propellers for a nose, or sharing his trains and smiling lime-green stegosaurus with visiting friends, are to read and be read to. By last count, he owns more than 300 books, including a lovely trilogy of Japanese folktales, collected under the title Once Upon a Time in Japan, that a friend from Chiba sent him for his upcoming birthday. We spend at least an hour reading to him each day. He is as transfixed by the tenth reading of his favorite stories as he is by the first. These days, more often than not, he reads to us, including from books he hadn’t previously encountered. This is the happy result of a child’s being read to since he was twelve hours old.

He may not have inherited the disease that Mommy and I have—the disease of being unable to get through a day without writing, even if only a blog post—but our influence has had an effect. A few months ago, he wrote an imaginary novel entitled The Blackberry, which he said is about a blackberry whose best friends are blueberries. The sequel, written with a speed that Balzac and Iris Murdoch would have envied, was The Blueberry, in which the blueberries of the first volume move to a new town and a new set of friends and adventures. The Berry Trilogy came to a satisfying conclusion with last month’s release of The Strawberry. There’s been talk of expanding the work into a tetralogy, but our son is still mulling over the narrative potential of the remaining berries.

We’ll see for how long our son’s love of literature lasts. His development has been fun to watch, and it has been especially gratifying to his two bookish parents. We hope he never loses the curiosity he has shown so far. What would be more gratifying still, however, would be for Mommy and me to get our novels published. To instill in a child a passion for books is important. But how great it would be to show our son that it’s possible to pursue a seemingly unattainable dream and to have it realized. To prove that, like that propeller-nosed sphinx, anything is possible. You just have to define your goal, perfect your idea, and never stop dreaming.

Yes. That would be a lovely example to set for him.

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What distinguished Saramago’s work, however, and what made him more than just a skeptic with an attitude, was his compassion and philosophical heft. He did more than just question Catholic dogma and right-wing politics. He thought deeply about the contradictions and discrepancies of accepted wisdom and challenged readers to do the same. His conceits may have been playful—the Iberian peninsula breaking off from the rest of continental Europe in The Stone Raft, or a proofreader inserting a history-altering word into a text in The History of the Siege of Lisbon—but his points were complex and subtle.

Cain, Saramago’s final work, is the Nobel laureate’s last questioning of the gospels. Although it’s an entertaining novel, it’s missing the philosophical rigor of the author’s earlier efforts. The playfulness has taken over, and the result is a story that feels more like a comic riff on the book of Matthew than a thoughtful examination of the hypocrisies of the original text.

Not that Cain doesn’t make valid points. Before the branded Cain travels east of Eden to the Land of Nod, he acknowledges that he killed his brother Abel, but that perhaps God bore some responsibility for the killing because of his refusal to accept Cain’s offerings with humility. Most of the time, however, Saramago uncharacteristically settles for facile evaluations and one-liners rather than trenchant analysis. The knee-jerk reaction to lines like, “…as well as being as big a son of a bitch as the lord, abraham was a consummate liar,” may be to laugh (that was my reaction), but one yearns for the complexity that makes Saramago’s work such a pleasure to read. Even those of us who agree with his sentiments about religion may wish he had at least been sensitive enough to ask why some people take comfort in religious teachings. That balance would have made Cain, like most of Saramago’s earlier works, a more satisfying experience.

As it is, Cain is good for a laugh, assuming that this is the sort of material you’re inclined to laugh at. Even light Saramago is worth reading. But as soon as I finished Cain, I pulled The Stone Raft off the shelf, reread the passage in which Iberia sets sail into the Atlantic, and savored anew the inventiveness that distinguished Saramago as one of literature’s most satisfying mischief makers.

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The novel is a long letter written by Mrs. Curren, a white, elderly Latin scholar dying of cancer, to her adult daughter, who moved to the U.S. years earlier to escape her home country’s brutal regime. At the opening of the story, Mrs. Curren discovers Vercueil, a homeless man whose race Coetzee never specifies, in the alley next to her house. Rather than demand that he leave her property, she invites Vercueil in and makes him a sandwich. Later, on her way out to go shopping, she collapses from the pain of her illness. Vercueil helps her back into the house. Thus begins a friendship so meaningful to Mrs. Curren that she asks him if he would mail her letter and other documents to her daughter after the cancer has overtaken her. She even fantasizes about sleeping with him.

But the fantasy quickly gives way to the most direct confrontation with Apartheid of Mrs. Curren’s life. Children in the nearby township of Guguletu have been burning down their schools. One of the children involved is 15-year-old Bheki, the oldest child of Mrs. Curren’s domestic.  One afternoon, Mrs. Curren discovers Bheki and two other boys beating up Vercueil in the alley. After she stops the assault, Mrs. Curren is stunned when her domestic expresses pride in Bheki’s actions. If the children of South Africa are cruel, she says, it is because the white man has made them that way. “These are good children,” she says. “They are like iron. We are proud of them.”

This attack is only the beginning of Mrs. Curren’s belated first encounters with the horrors of Apartheid, horrors from which her privileged upbringing had heretofore shielded her. The narrative takes her to hospitals where black African children are subjected to neglectful treatment, and to townships destroyed by security forces. As Mrs. Curren’s exposure to Apartheid in her dying days awakens her to a world she had known of and condemned but never seen, her letter to her daughter turns into a plea to get her to come back. She is more than just afraid of dying alone. She needs to know that the children of South Africa are still capable of love. “I cannot live without a child,” Mrs. Curren writes. “I cannot die without a child.”

In its understated way, Age of Iron may be Coetzee’s most passionate plea against his country’s 46-year reign of white supremacy. His story dramatizes the importance of courage in the face of injustice, even among people who seem at best indirectly affected by events. To ignore inequality imperils us all, Coetzee says, none more so than children. That South Africa has made strides since the book’s publication to correct its biases is cause for cautious optimism. One wonders what Mrs. Curren would have thought of the country her homeland has become since the end of Apartheid, and whether the surviving children of Age of Iron went on to have children of their own, and whether these offspring have entered a softer age than the one endured by their forebears.

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Eric Puchner’s Model Home is the best traditional narrative I read all year. Nothing about it is postmodern, but the book shows that there are still pleasures to be had from linear narratives thoughtfully told. It’s 1985, and Warren Ziller has moved his wife and three children from their upper-class life in Wisconsin to southern California, where he hopes to get even richer by developing desert land into residences. When he learns that the site he planned to develop abuts a toxic waste dump, the family’s fortunes begin to erode, and not just from their rapidly dwindling savings. Model Home is a tale of Reagan-era excess and the consequences suffered by some of the adherents to his morning-in-America philosophy. What could have been a painful reading experience is made enjoyable by Puchner’s empathy for his characters and his eye for telling details.

A different sort of domestic drama, also a linear narrative, is Emma Donoghue’s Room. The narrator, five-year-old Jack, has known only the inside of an 11-by-11 room where he lives with his mother. His hair, never cut, is waist length, and he sleeps in a wardrobe. The only person to visit is Old Nick, whose relationship to Jack’s mother isn’t clear to him. We slowly learn that the room Jack considers a home is actually a prison from which his mother yearns to escape. The bulk of the story focuses on his mother’s attempts to break free and give her son a normal life. Donoghue pulls off a tough balancing act: Her novel is both a heart-pounding thriller and a tender portrait of a mother-son relationship. It’s an amazing book.

Equally amazing is A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s deserved Pulitzer winner. I wasn’t sure I would enjoy a collection of interlocking stories that take place in the punk rock scene of the 1970’s. But Egan has created a brilliant assortment of characters, from the kleptomaniac who works as an assistant to a record executive, to “La Doll,” a PR guru whose plans for a Vanity Fair-like party go horribly wrong. Egan employs just about every storytelling technique, including one chapter told in second person and the now-famous chapter told in a series of PowerPoint slides. But Egan never lets postmodern tricks get in the way of telling the story. There’s a long-standing debate in publishing circles on the merits of linear vs. nonlinear narrative. Which is better? The answer: They both can be wonderful if the writer executes them well. Goon Squad is a shrewd, well-executed book.

My favorite work of fiction from 2011 was The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes’ short novel about a young man’s suicide and its effects on a school chum now in late-middle age. Tony Webster, the amicably divorced narrator, now in his 60’s, has never really forgotten Adrian Finn, but Finn resurfaces as a factor in Tony’s life when Tony receives an inheritance he wasn’t expecting. The circumstances behind this modest windfall force Tony to renew acquaintances he had long since thought were over. Why has he received this inheritance? Why did Veronica, a former girlfriend of Tony’s, receive Adrian’s diary from the same decedent, and why is she refusing to let him see it? Barnes’ masterwork is a meditation on memory, a sobering portrait of a man whose view of himself may not be a view shared by others. Barnes is often accused of being a cold writer, the implication being, apparently, that warmer is better. There’s nothing cold or distant about the final thirty pages of this novel. They are among the most emotionally devastating of his career.

Those were my favorite books from the past year. What were some of yours?

Although it would be a stretch to suggest that the brilliant British comics Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan are a latter-day Gilbert and Sullivan, there is a parallel between their personas and those of the 19^th century showmen, at least if we are to believe the portraits of them in The Trip, the hilarious 2011 film edited from the BBC series of the same name. Two characters named Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, who may or may not resemble their real-life counterparts, go on a tour of the north of England for an Observer piece on fine restaurants. Along the way, and for much of the film, the two comedians play a game of dueling impersonations. They debate who does the better Michael Caine and try to out-Scaramanga the other with quotes from The Man with the Golden Gun. You can judge for yourself who is the better mimic:

But The Trip has a serious side, too. The Steve Coogan character wants to be more than the cut-up who turned Alan Partridge, one of the great television creations of the 1990’s, into a household name in the UK. He wonders why Michael Sheen gets all the good roles. And he teases Brydon’s character for being nothing more than the fixture on Radio 4 panel shows with the astonishing ability to reduce his voice to the tinny sound of a small man in a box.

What vexes Coogan almost as much as not being a more successful or respected actor is that Brydon is perfectly content with his role as a panel-show fixture. He is happy—not just with his career but with his marriage and child—in ways that Coogan is not. Coogan may not aspire to Sullivan-like heights of significance and immortality, but he’s also not sure he would refuse a genie’s offer to give his son a curable disease in exchange for a Best Actor Oscar.

The parallel with Gilbert and Sullivan goes only so far, of course. Sullivan’s more serious fare, The Lost Chord and Ivanhoe and Macbeth…well, they’re kind of dull. The tragedy of Sullivan’s life is that he wasn’t the great composer he dearly wanted to be. Steve Coogan is far more versatile than Arthur Sullivan; his many television and film roles prove this. But part of the fun of The Trip comes from not knowing how much of this frustration is real and how much is artifice. We suspect when we watch The Trip that we are witnessing portraits that no more reflect the feelings of the real Coogan and Brydon than their uncanny imitations are the real Michael Caine. In the end, of course, it doesn’t really matter whether the film is true to life or not. What matters is that Coogan and Brydon are brilliant at what they do, and that their film is one of the great entertainments of 2011. Great entertainment is a rare achievement that no one should undervalue. Sadly, that’s a lesson that Arthur Sullivan appears never to have learned.

A Good American, Alex George’s charming, sweet-natured US début novel, understands the power of music. In telling the saga of the Meisenheimer family, from Frederick and Jette’s immigration to Missouri in the early 1900s to their grandchildren’s travails in the present day, George often invokes music as a leitmotif to the proceedings, so often, in fact, that it becomes one of the novel’s central characters.

Many of the book’s more dramatic scenes incorporate music into the storyline. A household filled with song is silenced by the death of musical parents. A gifted singer is anguished by his inability to perform in public, or to serenade the woman he loves. The narrator and his brothers form a quartet when they are boys and continue singing together well into adulthood, for celebratory as well as solemn events. The restaurant the family runs is a home for jazz musicians in the part of the country that, along with New Orleans, would become synonymous with jazz.

The novel is a showcase not just for George’s obvious passion for music—in a lovely phrase, he refers to the blues as “the cracked holler of remorse”—but for his encyclopedic knowledge of it. Early in the narrative, we see Buddy Bolden wailing on his cornet. Later, a young Missouri pianist named Truman plays an aria from The Barber of Seville while stationed in Paris during World War One, thirty years before his ascension to the presidency. The book abounds with knowing references to jazz and opera. A Good American is as much a celebration of music, mostly American music, as it is a saga of a family.

Upon his arrival in the United States, the young Frederick Meisenheimer receives advice that becomes another of the novel’s leitmotifs: the one goal he should strive to achieve is to become the novel’s title. Through Meisenheimer’s story, George, a British lawyer now living in Missouri, reminds us that one of the proudest parts of America’s heritage in the 20^th century is its music, the syncopations and polyrhythms—the swing—that are as much a part of the nation’s character as its industry and individualism. There have been many good Americans, but music, George suggests, is one of the best Americans of all.

The criticism I’ve never accepted, however, is the one concerning Allen’s worldview. The critique usually goes something like this: Woody Allen never writes about people other than upper-class Caucasians from the Upper East Side, or, in his European films of the past seven years, from Kensington, Knightsbridge, and the trendier arrondissements of Paris. If all you ever watched were Woody Allen films, you’d never know that African-Americans were on the planet. Every character can afford to eat at swanky restaurants, shop at Saks Fifth Avenue, and travel abroad at least once a year. The apartments are posh. Every tasteful room and tasteful wardrobe contains nothing but earth tones. Hasn’t Woody Allen ever heard of blue?

The first problem with this line of criticism is that Allen has directed many films that are about lower-class characters who can’t afford Saks: Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Radio Days, Shadows and Fog, Mighty Aphrodite, Sweet and Lowdown, Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Anything Else. True, all of these films are either in black-and-white or saturated with earth tones, and many are nostalgia trips steeped more in the world of Damon Runyon than in contemporary society. But none is guilty of trafficking in the upper-class porn that Allen’s critics accuse him of favoring.

He does, however, seem most comfortable writing about the wealthy and cultured. That is a valid observation. But therein lies the second problem: What’s wrong with that? Every artist is entitled to his or her worldview. One could argue that all great artists have a handful of themes that obsess and motivate them. John Ford made Westerns; Kurosawa made action films overflowing with perceptive insights about the human condition; Fellini used grotesques or small-town villagers to comment on life and celebrity in Italy. The same is true of novelists, painters, and poets: Each roots himself or herself in a comfortable milieu from which to observe the world at large. That’s what Woody Allen does in his films.

What disturbs many of Allen’s critics is the rarefied air his characters inhabit. I do not belong to the world of wealth and privilege—I am of the 99%—but I allow Allen his perspective as I would for any other artist worth paying attention to. One could say that you’d never know that educated, white-collar Caucasians were on the planet if all you ever watched were Spike Lee pictures. You’d never know from Martin Scorsese films (aside from, say, The Age of Innocence) that anyone in America has a job that isn’t connected to boxing, casinos, organized crime, and the like. But Lee’s and Scorsese’s films are gritty, so you never hear this criticism. Allen’s films are pretty, which apparently makes them flawed.

Many of Allen’s films, particularly the later ones, are flawed, but not because his characters are rich snobs. They’re flawed because they’re not funny (Melinda and Melinda, Whatever Works), or the characters aren’t fully fleshed out (most of the women in Midnight in Paris), or the plots are misconceived (Cassandra’s Dream). But his good films—and he has directed many good films, some of which are among the best ever made—are wry explorations of human nature that just happen to be situated among the wealthier classes.

I suspect that Woody Allen: A Documentary, the American Masters installment that PBS will air this Sunday and Monday night, will demonstrate the range of this amazing artist. Anyone willing to look past the maitre d’s and chandeliers will find one of the finest and most intellectually curious directors America has ever produced. Modern moviegoers know a lot of blockbuster specialists. They should meet some auteurs once in a while. They might learn something.

In “Solitary Swedish Houses,” from the 1958 collection Secrets On the Way (Hemligheter På Vägen), one almost shudders at Tranströmer’s deceptively simple portrait of the chilling majesty of rural Sweden. The poem begins:

Images such as these are common in Tranströmer’s writing. What I didn’t expect, and what for me is the most startling and beautiful aspect of his work, is his passionate writing about music. Although Tranströmer’s remarkably varied poetry touches on many themes—his travels in Africa, feelings of isolation and the inevitability of death—his most sublime poems for me are those whose subjects are music and the complicated reactions it often inspires. “The Sad Gondola” is an ode to Liszt and the majesty of his piano compositions. In “Brief Pause in the Organ Recital,” the ambient noises a parishioner hears between hymns remind him of lost friendships, and of the incipient outlines of death’s features.

Other poems celebrate the pure joy of music, as in this excerpt from “C Major”:

And in this lovely verse from “Schubertiana,” Tranströmer evokes music’s ability to heighten all of our other senses:

It is no surprise, then, and quite wonderful, that Tranströmer, who is paralyzed on his right side and has difficulty speaking due to a stroke he suffered in 1990, will accept his Nobel Prize in Literature not with a lecture but with a piano recital. I can think of no more appropriate way for this most musical of poets to receive his award. Few art forms are as eloquent and immediate as music. A concert of pieces written for the left hand, pieces that Swedish composers have adapted specifically for Tranströmer, is a fitting tribute not only to music’s many powers but also to the poet’s courage and accomplishments. I have no doubt that, during Tranströmer’s recital, every one of the assembled guests at Stockholm Concert Hall will be smiling, much like the citizens shrouded by those turned-up collars in the swirling snow.

I showed some of my early stories to a friend of mine. A couple of weeks after I had given them to him, we went out to dinner. He said nothing about my work, seemed, in fact, to be avoiding the subject. Near the close of our meal, I asked him if he had read the stories. He said yes and then hurried in another spoonful of dessert. When I asked, “What did you think of them?” this friend, who is not a writer, gave me the most astute writing criticism anyone had ever shared with me.

“They’re not you,” he said. “I mean, they’re OK, but they don’t sound like you. They’re not about anything you care about.” He paused. “You’re a funny guy. Why don’t you write something funny? Your stories might be better if you did.”

He would not be the last person to make this suggestion. My wife, who is fond of my more serious pieces, has told me more than once than my daily discourse is at its most vivid when I indulge my sardonic sense of humor. Why not inject more of that into your writing? You don’t have to write farces or slapstick, she said, although those could be good, too. Just give yourself permission to be funny. Don’t worry about those other guys. See what happens.

So I have. My recent first-person narrators are less refined than their earnest predecessors. They use slang and don’t shy away from making impolite remarks. My earlier preoccupation with relevance at all costs has given way to the simpler pleasure of letting scenes evolve more naturally. I’m having more fun writing than I’ve ever had before.

And now that I’m no longer trying to be profound, my stories are more significant, at least to me, than they were when I tried to cram them full of relevance. They speak truths that the narrators of the past were too shy and tongue-tied to utter. They are fresh in a way that many of my maiden attempts were not.

I don’t know yet what agents and editors will think of my emerging style. All I know is that I think it’s better, and that can only lead to better and richer stories, more experimentation, more fun.

There’s nothing wrong with emulating any of the writers I cited earlier, if that’s the type of writer you are. But if you’re not, your stories will probably be leaden and untrue. Mine were, anyway. I know now what I should have known a long time ago: I’m not Bellow or Coetzee or Saramago and shouldn’t pretend to be. But perhaps that’s the sort of discovery that can only come from trying on another writer’s style and realizing that it doesn’t fit.