ABSTRACT
Cervantes often depicted the craft of writing in his works. In the prologue to Don Quijote, he portrays himself as uninspired, head in hand, staring at the empty page and wondering what to say. In the Novelas ejemplares he invites his readers to a game of billiards. Both images are serious and playful in different ways. In one, he appears to be self-deprecating, but is also underlining the creative control that comes from hard choices about what to write next. In the other, he stresses the ludic dimension of fiction, not to down-play its importance—‘horas hay de recreación’—but to emphasize that literature is a game of skill for more than one player. When these two images are superimposed, the result is a useful set of tools for understanding what Cervantes is trying to do in his fiction, and why he is so good at it.
