Writers On Writing: Zadie Smith on Influence

Craft books abound. For every possible writing problem there are six books on how to overcome it. Some of these books are uniquely instructive and transformative, a guiding light in the endless dark of your creative process. Others less so.

As your friendly neighborhood writing center we've separated the wheat from the chaff and in the coming months we'll be sending passages from our favorites.

This month's selection is about staying open to being influenced by the work of others from Zadie Smith's collection of essays, Changing My Mind:

Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. Not one word. They don’t even want to see the cover of a novel. As they write, the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one will ever write again. Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife.

It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty David Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

Ready to get started on a project of your own? Check out our calendar of upcoming workshops (both in-person and online) and discover what sort of story you're ready to tell.