Zadie Smith On Writing

 Another gift from the federal government was getting a chance to read Zadie Smith. I knew of her, had not thought of reading her, then off I go to prison and decide to take seriously the idea that I should return to writing fiction. I acquired a crush on her - one that has only increased since my release - YouTube has several interviews and lectures. She is a wonder to listen to - she has a grace that marks her writing. What else I have written about Zadie Smith can be found here.

Anyway, The Guardian published Zadie Smith on NW – Guardian book club, which I think has good advice on writing and, yes, it captures her graceful intelligence. 

What's this novel about? My books don't seem to me to be about anything other than the people in them and the sentences used to construct them. Which makes NW sound like an "exercise in style", a phrase you generally hear people using as an insult of one kind or another. But to me, an exercise in style is not a superficial matter – our lives are also an exercise in style. The hidden content of people's lives proves a very hard thing to discern: all we really have to go on are these outward, manifest signs, the way people speak, move, dress, treat each other. And that's what I try to concern myself with in fiction: the way of things in reality, as far as I am able to see and interpret them, which may not be especially far.

When I was writing this novel what I really wanted to do was create people in language. To do that you must try to do justice simultaneously to the unruly, subjective qualities of language, and to what I want to call the concrete "thingyness" of people. Which was Virginia Woolf's way of being a modernist – she loved language and people simultaneously – and her model is important to me. I admire Beckett and respect Joyce. I love Woolf. Whenever the going gets tough I reread her journals and it helps me through.