In her lecture “That Crafty Feeling” (2008), Zadie Smith’s approach to the craft of writing is somewhat different than expected. For one, Smith says at the very onset that she can’t offer advice on a single overarching "Craft Of Writing." Rather, when talking about writing, all she can draw from is her own experience of writing, her particular craft. This too is not a monolith, as her craft differs from one novel to another. She then goes onto offer ten bits of advice for writers, which she says are specific of her career output of three novels in twelve years. I think Smith’s no-size-fits-all approach itself is useful for writing students because it gives them the freedom to experiment with their writing process. Smith suggests that an over-dependence on rules and writing manuals may actually encumber the writer-in-training and keep them from finding their voice. Trying to figure out the “technique” of writing may be like trying to breathe consciously. If you’ve ever done the latter, you know how breathless you end up feeling!
It felt like being asked to be attentive to your breathing, to your in, out, in, out, in, out…I thought: if I read one more word about the intimate third person, I’ll never be able to write the bloody thing again.
Out of the ten bits of advice Smith lists, I’d like to discuss a couple in greater detail. The first is titled “OPD in the First Twenty pages.” Smith suggests most novelists are either macro-planners or micro-managers, the latter a class to which she belongs. Macro-planners, very roughly speaking, have the plot and structure of their story worked out before they start the first page. Micro-managers like Smith on the other hand, “start at the first sentence of a novel and…finish at the last.” In other words, they work out the exact details of their plot as they write. Smith’s tone shows she obviously prefers the micro-manager approach, but she qualifies her bias with this statement:
I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying.
For a writing student, one bit of relevant advice here is that neither of the two methods is sacrosanct; what is more important is identifying the method with which one is comfortable. The second bit is about paying attention to beginnings, especially for writers who work in Smith’s vein. She terms this tendency to obsess over the “first 20 pages” of novels Obsessive Perspective Disorder, or OPD. Although sometimes the tendency to dwell on these pages can spin out of control, as in the case of Smith’s first novel On Beauty (2005), where she “reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years,” paying attention to beginnings has its uses. It can help writers find the “tone” of their novel or story, which is crucial to the writing process.
Yet while OPD is happening, somehow the work of the rest of the novel gets done. That’s the strange thing. It’s as if you’re winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter…when you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months...Once I get the tone, every-thing else follows. You hear interior decorators say the same about a shade of paint.
Some writers tend to shoot off their writing to a magazine or publisher the moment they finish it. In “Step Away from the Vehicle," point number 8 on Smith’s list, the novelist explains why this is a bad practice. She suggests writers should instead wait and “step away from the vehicle” until they have enough distance from their work to be able to look at it as a reader. This second look, as a reader, is extremely useful in editing their work.
You can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight. It is the only absolutely 24-karat gold-plated piece of advice I have to give you…After I read Alan Hollinghurst’s magnificent novel The Line of Beauty, I met him at a dinner, and drunkenly I think I asked him how he got his novel to be so magnificently. He said: “Oh, I left it for a long while. And then I tinkered with it. Five years, actually.”
That’s the best piece of writing advice I ever had.
Finally, writers can also learn from stylistic features Smith uses to compose this particular lecture. Her language is alive, entertaining, and free from the clutter of heavy jargon. It makes you want to listen to her, ears cocked. One way Smith energizes her language is with lots of contemporary, relatable metaphors. Gaining objective distance from your work becomes “stepping away from the vehicle”; finding the right tone is like an interior decorator searching for the right shade of paint. She also illustrates her advice with personal experience, making it immersive and immediate for the reader. Further, the shunning of dry jargon, accompanied with the easy use of words like “magnificently,” gives the lecture the air of a free-flowing conversation between Smith and the listener/reader.
https://believermag.com/that-crafty-feeling/
Early in her essay, Zadie Smith proposes that “Reading about craft is like listening to yourself breathe. Writing about craft prompts a self-consciousness so acute one forgets how to exhale altogether.” The advice here seems to be that students or young writers shouldn’t fixate too much on theories about the craft of writing; if they do, they will become too self-conscious about their work. Just as being conscious about one’s breathing might in turn render one’s breathing unnatural and strange, so too might being self-conscious about one’s craft render one’s writing unnatural and strange. The implication is that a student or young writer needs to maintain some distance from the craft of his or her writing in order to ensure that he or she is writing freely and naturally.
Smith describes two types of writers. The first type is the “Micro Planner.” The second type is the “Macro Planner.” The former begins with the first sentence and then works on, organically, letting the structure grow from the accumulation of words.The latter, she says, designs the structure or plot of the story before writing a word. Smith uses the metaphor of building a house to demonstrate her point. She says,
Macro Planners have their houses basically built from day one and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture.
In this metaphor the house represents the overall structure of the story, and the furniture represents the characters, settings and so forth. Micro Planners, on the other hand,
build a house floor by floor, discreetly and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.
In other words, the framework or exterior of a Micro Planner’s story is determined according to, and subsequent to, the internal fixtures being put in place. The external structure, or plot, is built around the internal fixtures.
Understanding the difference between a Micro Planner and a Macro Planner is perhaps a useful starting point for any budding writer. A Micro Planner who always—to continue Smith’s metaphor—gets stuck on the ground floor, fixating over the internal fixtures, might try instead to become a Macro Planner. Likewise, a Macro Planner, who builds the house only to find that he or she can’t find the internal fixtures to fit inside it, might try instead to take the Micro approach.
The one piece of advice that Smith offers that she says is indispensable is to, metaphorically, “Step away from the vehicle.” She goes on to explain that “The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” What Smith means by this is that after finishing a story, one should step away from it for as long as possible, and only after a significant amount of time has passed should one return to it to edit it. In this way, one can become more of an objective reader and critic rather than the invested writer. One can judge the work more honestly and therefore edit it all the more effectively.
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