Writing creatively begins with reading avidly, noted author asserts

BY LIN FISH
Special to Rice News

The best education for one who aspires to be a creative writer is to read voraciously, across genres and generations, award-winning author Zadie Smith told the audience at the 2010 Campbell Lecture presented last week at Rice University.

	ZADIE SMITH

At the Nov. 10 talk, the lauded young author of “White Teeth,” a vibrant coming-of-age tale set in today’s multicultural London and winner of the 2000 Whitbread Award, read from her latest book, “Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays,” a collection of essays written for The New Yorker, The Guardian and similar publications.

The Campbell Lectures were made possible by a $1 million gift from alumnus T.C. Campbell ’34. “Mr. Campbell was passionate about literature and the arts,” said Nicolas Shumway, dean of humanities. “The goal of the Campbell Lectures is to bring to Rice renowned speakers and give them a platform to represent the best literature of our time.

“Zadie Smith is such a speaker,” Shumway said. “She is a phenomenal and original talent, a gift to all of us who love books and reading. Her fiction addresses a dizzying array of cultures in beautifully crafted prose. Her writing also is very funny; I read her first book on an airplane, and I laughed out loud several times,” he said.

Smith read from her essay on the craft of writing. In a passage describing when the writer is half through writing the novel, “a sort of magical thinking takes place,” she said. This is when “nothing in the world matters except the writing,” she said; the writer pays no attention to normal daily activities.

“It’s a state of mind when time collapses,” she said. “Everything flows freely into the novel, and the writer cannot believe how in touch with the world it is.”

Writing the first 20 pages flows smoothly for her, but it goes downhill later, Smith said. Among other useless measures, she indulges in elaborate sentence-making. “That’s the point at which you can’t let a character walk across the room without writing a backstory.”

Next the writer must “dismantle the ‘scaffolding’ — information not needed but written to make you feel assured; it gives you confidence when you have none,” she said. “Later, when the book is old and dog-eared, you realize it is not necessary.”

Then it’s time to “step away from the vehicle,” Smith advised. Let the work sit. “If money is not a priority, put the manuscript in a drawer for a year … or at least for three months.” Then, she said, “become a reader, not a writer. Put yourself in the head of a smart stranger who picks it off the shelf.”

Later, when the work is published for all to read, Smith distances herself from the words she wrote. “I have never read ‘White Teeth,'” she said. “It fills me with nausea, and I suspect that it and I may never be reconciled.” She acknowledged, however, “in isolated pockets, this is exactly what I meant to write.”

These essays reveal a writer who keeps an open mind as she refines her view of life, literature, family and fame. Smith readily admitted that they show how her tastes have evolved. Her attitudes have changed, just as what she likes to read and to write has changed. “And that’s good,” she said.

Published in 2000, “White Teeth” won multiple awards, including the Guardian First Book Award. Smith also wrote “The Autograph Man” and “On Beauty,” an acclaimed novel about a mixed-raced English family living in the United States that was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize.

She conducted a workshop on creative writing at Rice the following day.