Sister At The Glass Mountain

Reading The Annotated Brothers Grimm, I've been captivated by the turn-of-the-century illustrations for the tales, many of which I've never actually seen before.  Above, one of the most provocative, by Arthur Rackham (1909): in an attempt to find and rescue her brothers, cursed and turned into ravens, a young girl cuts off her finger and sticks it into a keyhole in order to gain entry to the Glass Mountain, where her brothers now live.

I've also been reading The Paris Review Interviews (vol. III), specifically an interview with Joyce Carol Oates, which ended up to be especially helpful today.  Since Oates writes enough material for the entirety of contemporary literature, I thought reading her might provide some insight into my problems with plot.  No magical insights into how she produces so damn much, but she did make me think about writing, no excuses, even if I have to cut off my finger to access the story:

INTERVIEWER

Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write?  Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind?...

OATES 

One must be pitiless about this matter of "mood."  In a sense, the writing will create the mood.  If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function--a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind--then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the activity of writing changes everything...

--from Joyce Carol Oates, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review Interviews, III, p. 173.

Right, right.  ShThFuUpAnWoOnYoNo.