Zadie Smith |
Published: March 9th, 2015
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Zadie Smith is an acclaimed English novelist and essayist. She's been listed by Granta as one of the 20 best young authors and was included in Time magazine's TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list. She also teaches at New York University's creative writing program.
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Howl: In your essay, “Joy,” you elaborate on the difference between pleasure (which seems more perennial) and joy (which is more extreme, but burns out quicker). Which for you, do you think, writing falls under?
Smith: For me, neither. It's usually just painful, with moments of joy but not many. The joy comes from completion but for a novelist in particular that's always a few years off. I got joy from writing that essay. Because it became a successful container for a set of thoughts and feelings I'd had. But, quite soon after it's finished, writing stops being a source of anything to me. It's as if someone else wrote - I don't seem to get much satisfaction from 'having written.' Howl: What is your writing and editing process like? Smith: I love editing, because it's rational and you know what the task in front of you is. The writing is more painful because you don't really know what you're doing. But once I have a basic shape, it's pleasure to go through it and treat it like a piece of work a student has given me: correct the errors, sharpen things, trim the fat. With an essay the process is quite manageable; with a novel it's my habit to read the whole thing from the top each day before I start editing, and that can be a very slow and debilitating process. It's better just to try and push on but I often get bogged down in trying to make early pages perfect instead of moving on. Howl: How do you construct a story line when it comes to memoir or essay with the right flashbacks, inner monologue, and key details to go with the real life events you write about? Smith: It's hard to answer…I don't think of writing that way. I don't think: now it's time for a flashback, or let’s have a bit of inner monologue here. I don't think about key details. If I'm making an argument I guess I think: what will serve this argument? But mainly I'm just constructing sentences, thinking about how they sound, and trying to formulate an idea or an argument within them. The construction is line by line. And it's not all me, not even mostly me, doing the writing. I believe writing is a collective thing: what's constructing my sentences is all the sentences I've read and all the authors who wrote them. I don't look back on “Joy” for example and think: Oh, there's me speaking my truth, or whatever. I think: oh, that's the essay where I combined the tone of Virginia Woolf and American confessional writing, and a bit of Roland Barthes and bit of this and a bit of that, and 'Joy' was the result. Something of myself is probably expressed in it, but it’s the part that itself is made up of other people's texts. Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers? Smith: To read. It's the only advice I have. And to read not just the books of the past 20 years but the books of the last 1,000 years. Howl: Do you typically pick something that happened in your life and then give it a "deeper meaning" in your story or is it the other way around - wanting to express a "deeper meaning" and finding something that happened in your life as a vehicle to tell it? Smith: I don't think 'deeper meaning' has any meaning to me. It's not a matter of levels of deepness. To me it's about connections. Something that has happened to me will connect in my mind with something else, a fact, a song, a book, a theory – and I used everything I have to exploit and follow those connections. I don't [believe] the writer has any special access to deep meanings. I think the writer is perhaps good at seeing connections and expressing them. I don't think she invents them, she just spots them and clarifies them. And the pleasure for the reader (hopefully) is that once the connection is pointed [out]they realize they knew it already. I'm not writing about anything that every student in your class doesn't know already. I'm not interested in deepness. I'm interesting in connecting what I have noticed with what you have noticed. |