In 2010 Zadie Smith told the Guardian her ten rules of writing:
- When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
- When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
- Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
- Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
- Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
- Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
- Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
- Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
- Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
- Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
For a novel, put it in a drawer for at least three months before editing it – as a reader.
In 2008 she told Columbia University’s Writing Program what it is like for her to write a novel:
The beginning is rough going:
“Worrying over the first twenty pages is a way of working on the whole novel, a way of finding its structure, its plot, its characters — all of which, for a Micro Manager, are contained in the sensibility of a sentence. Once the tone is there, all else follows. You hear interior decorators say the same about a shade of paint.”
The middle is like being in love:
“By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post — I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semicolon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind.”
The end is wonderful:
“It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I’d been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then I lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time, crying. It was sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky.”
– Abagond, 2017.
Sources: The Guardian, Brain Pickings.
See also:
- Zadie Smith: Speaking in Tongues
- Stephen King: On Becoming A Good Writer
- C.S. Lewis’s advice on writing
- Orwell’s Rules of Writing
- How to write like Orwell
- How to write like Hemingway
- How to write like the Reader’s Digest
- How to write like The Economist – part serious, part tongue-in-cheek
556
I read this book maybe two months ago and was introduced to Dostoevsky. I’ve since then read An Honest Thief and a few analysis on him. Psych and feminist perspectives. This led to Freud’s full analysis on Dostoevsky. As a Clinical Social Worker, what an interesting and interdisciplinary rabbit hole. To me, that’s the point. The rabbit hole.
LikeLike
“Changing My Mind”…That Crafty Feeling
LikeLike
This is absolutely beautiful. Just the inspiration I need to work on my novel today. Thanks.
LikeLiked by 1 person