Changing My Mind

Zadie Smith

5 ideas

1. Macro Planners Versus Micro Managers

   Novelists tend to fall into one of two working types. Macro Planners map the whole structure before writing and revise at the end. Micro Managers build the book sentence by sentence and cannot move to the next page until the current one is right, so their first pages are rewritten obsessively and the structure emerges late. Knowing which type you are explains your particular blockages, such as the Micro Manager's paralysis over openings, better than any general advice on craft.

2. Style Is Personality, Failure Is Inevitable

   A writer's style is not decoration laid over content. It is the necessary expression of a particular consciousness and way of being in the world, so a false or borrowed style is a failure of personal honesty. Every novel falls short of the ideal version the writer imagined, and the measure of the work is how truthfully it records that particular way of seeing, not whether it avoids failure. Reading well also takes labour: the reader must meet the writer's consciousness with skill and effort rather than consume it passively.

3. Speaking in Many Voices

   Moving between classes, regions or races often forces a person to trade an original voice for an acquired one. Treating that trade as betrayal assumes a single authentic self. Smith instead reads the ability to hold several voices at once, which she sees in Barack Obama's shifting registers and in Shakespeare's many-sided sympathy, as a richer form of identity, not a lack of conviction.

4. Lyrical Realism Assumes a Coherent Self

   Mainstream literary fiction, which Smith calls lyrical realism, rests on unexamined beliefs: that the self is continuous and knowable and that fine sentences can capture authentic experience. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is her example of the tradition's polished anxiety. Tom McCarthy's Remainder is her counterexample: it exposes these beliefs by showing a man compulsively staging reenactments to feel real. The avant-garde path is valuable because it makes visible the conventions that realism passes off as nature.

5. Her Father's Comedy and Death

   Smith's father, Harvey Smith, was a working-class Englishman who landed at Normandy in 1944 and lived a life of modest disappointments. He shared his children's love of British comedy, which she describes through shows like Fawlty Towers. Laughter at failure and mortality worked as the family's inherited form of grief and consolation.

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