I think that writing is very difficult, but so is any job carefully executed. What is a privilege, however, is to do a job to your own satisfaction. I think that I’m excessively demanding of myself and others because I cannot tolerate errors; I think that it is a privilege to do anything to a perfect degree. It is true though that writers are often megalomaniacs and they consider themselves to be the center of the universe and society’s conscience. But what I most admire is something well done. I’m always very happy when I’m traveling to know that the pilots are better pilots than I am a writer.

—Gabriel García Márquez, Paris Review interview, 1981

Gabo was being modest. Literary writing is more like stunt piloting than commercial flying, and for over fifty years he was one of the greatest aces on the scene. (What's the equivalent of commercial flying? Journalism, some might argue—although in the same interview García Márquez refused to recognize a distinction between the two genres.)

Still, the metaphor sums up the exquisite perfectionism of his style, as well his basic aim as a writer: to keep the reader sailing through the heights till the very end, to take him through turbulence but never crash him into despair. Although his novels encompass the whole scope of human tragedy, his vision throughout remained fundamentally, tirelessly comic. I don't just mean witty or funny, although he was often hilarious:

While he would rub Amaranta Úrsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peachlike stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. [One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rabassa trans.]

I mean comic in the cosmic sense—the grand, redemptive sense embodied in The Tempest and The Odyssey, Leaves of Grass and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; and celebrated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces:

[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man....Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest—as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.

Reading this passage beside García Márquez's books, you feel it should have been their back-cover blurb. Myth and fairy tale were his constant hunting grounds: the great breakthrough in his style, he said, came from recalling the tales his grandmother told him as a child. Cien años de soledad, the novel that catapulted him overnight into world celebrity—along with the previously all-but-ignored literature of his country and region—is indeed "a deeper truth...a more difficult realization...a sounder structure...a revelation more complete" than most of the insistently tragic novels of its century.

Of those descriptors, García Márquez, with his emphasis on hyper-competence, might have been most pleased by "a sounder structure." The sheer narrative craft required to piece together the multi-generational saga of the Buendías—and make it seem effortless, even improvised, a grandmother's story rolling off the tongue—is enough to make an Intro to Fiction Writing student weep. That craftsmanship announces itself, too, on the level of each sentence. Gabo wrote some of the great virtuoso sentences of the twentieth century (the one I quoted above; the one that concludes "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"; the outrageous description of a gunshot in Chronicle of a Death Foretold: "It was a wise custom established by his father ever since one morning when a servant girl had shaken the case to get the pillow out and the pistol went off as it hit the floor and the bullet wrecked the cupboard in the room, went through the living room wall, passed through the dining room of the house next door with the thunder of war, and turned a life-size saint on the main altar of the church on the opposite side of the square to plaster dust")—but even the humblest niches of his cathedral of language gleam with irresistible offerings.

From the Paris Review interview again:

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

INTERVIEWER

Can you explain that analogy a little more?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work are involved. And as Proust, I think, said, it takes ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. I never have done any carpentry but it’s the job I admire most, especially because you can never find anyone to do it for you.

As if with a wave of the hand, the sorcerer strips the "magic" from his famed magical realism. But that craftsmanship, of course, is the magic. Good ideas are cheap: every novelist or business mogul has heard dozens from friends and relatives. It's the inhuman persistence required to perfect the idea, achieve the "difficult realization," that most of us can't comprehend. The writing process for García Márquez's masterpiece was as follows:

Back home in Mexico City (to which he had moved his family in 1961), he began to write his new novel, a process that would consume eighteen months of concerted locked-away effort, ream after ream of paper, countless packs of cigarettes, and nearly every possession in the house. While he wrote, his wife, Mercedes, cared for their two children, the house, and their finances. They sold their car, pawned almost all their appliances, and obtained credit after extended credit. Halfway through this period, García Márquez sent the book's first three chapters to the Mexican writer and diplomat, Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes's public response was, "I have just read eighty pages from a master." Several months later, with thirteen hundred manuscript pages in hand as well as incurred debt of more than ten thousand dollars, the soon-to-be-celebrated novelist pawned a few more possessions in order to buy postage and sent the manuscript to Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires.

Sudamericana published the book in June 1967 with a first printing of eight thousand copies, which were snatched up within the first week. ["The Great Novel of the Americas?" Harper Perennial edition, One Hundred Years of Solitude]

To anyone who's ever tried writing, or fulfilling a creative vision of any kind amid the endless to-do list of everyday life, that story sounds more mythic than handsome giants washing up on shore or women ascending to heaven while hanging laundry.

Fuentes' compliment also, I think, points to the contrast between a concept long in vogue in our culture—"genius"—and a concept we don't hear about as often, "mastery." Genius has traditionally been linked in metaphor with a breath of divine wind or a divine inner spark; as such, it can come and go, blaze out of control or be snuffed in an instant. As a metaphor with mystical origins, it carries an aura of the ineffable—and so has proved easy to fake by charismatics of the type who in other lives might have founded a religious cult. (The word "genius" cropped up often in obituaries for the late Steve Jobs, a man genuinely brilliant in one domain only: selling things.)
In the literary world, the word "genius" gets promiscuously applied to charismatic personalities, undeveloped prodigies, and writers more noted for their ideas than the realization of those ideas. And it's popularly associated with a tragic, erratic quality—think of all those American literary celebrities who drank themselves to death—that informs both the life and the writing. More interesting to me is mastery: that nirvana state only a rare few writers reach, in which they're able to take you by hand from the beginning of a piece to the end, from one book to the next, and never lose their grip. Drop a quarter on their prose at random: it'll bounce.

Or to return to García Márquez's comparison—if the writer were a pilot, you'd go up in a plane with them no matter what the weather. You may not enjoy each flight, but you have total faith in the soundness of the craft and the skill of the operator. Even geniuses often fall shy of this standard. Could you honestly say Hemingway attained it, for example? How about Melville, whose steering hand gains and loses steadiness from chapter to chapter? How many true masters has literature ever produced, as opposed to great talents whose gift was more in control of them than vice versa? Now that Gabo's gone, how many are still flying at those heights?