zadie smith on feeling, writing, and failing better

Zadie Smith

Been gone for while. I won't apologize because this blog is MIIIIINE. ("Never apologize, never explain"...is that something someone really said? Or just one of these appropriated-to-death figments of our collective imagination?) No, but really, there is something to be said about starting a thing and committing to it. That's one of my new, adult-life goals. But, more simply, it feels good to write thoroughly in my own voice, for an audience of only myself. It feels good to have a clean-slate, non-scary, open forum in which I can see all my random obsessions laid out neatly before me.

Clearly, dear reader, I'm not thinking about you right now.

I felt compelled to come back to this space for a purpose other than shamelessly self-promoting myself. But I don't know what to say. That's the problem with feeling compelled to write. So - because I am a firm believer in not speaking unless you have something truly awesome to say - I'll recruit Zadie Smith to make me sound smarter than I really am.

A fellow writer passed Zadie's 2007 essay "Fail Better" along to me about a month ago, and I am so grateful that it has come into my life. I think "Fail Better" is a piece that all writers, especially writers looking to make a life out of their craft (what a ridiculous thing to do!), should read. 

Zadie's thesis here is that, as a writer, you will inevitably fail yourself. You will want, more than anything that's ever been wanted in the history of wanting, to write beautifully, accurately, and, above all, truthfully. And you also want to be successful, like, in mainstream terms. But those two desires rarely combine triumphantly. All the words you planned on saying, which sounded so perfect in your brain, won't resonate the same way on the page. Or, maybe they will, but no one gets it and no one likes it. And this failure is, unfortunately, intensely personal, no matter how vigilantly we deny that that imaginary character whose name is a variant of our own isn't really us. (Trust me: it's us.) 

"Though we rarely say it publicly," Zadie writes, "we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true."

I can't speak for all writers when I say this, but this writer wears her Garda-armored heart on her bloody sleeve. It's a weird feeling, a difficult paradox, and it inevitably shows up even in the most fictioniest of my fictions. But Zadie feels me here:

"A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure depends not only on refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions."

I find this unravelling of the craft enlightening, but also comforting. What artists require, she seems to argue, is not just the medium itself  (if you're lucky, you've got the words/brushstrokes/shot in your viewfinder down pat), but the discipline of honing that raw, sometimes unusable, material. And this, or Aristotle's "education of the emotions," doesn't only need to apply to writing, or to creating "successful" art in general. I think it's a guideline on how to best present yourself to the world; how to act and react, how to intelligently form emotional bonds, how to suck the marrow out of life without gorging yourself to death. Emotions are wonderful, they are the source of life's wonder and beauty. And they should be - they must be - expressed in whatever way you know how. But emotions can also be dangerous. Emotions can be a rusty shiv. You've got to learn how to wield your weapon.   

Excepting a few truly brilliant works (e.g. Dani Shapiro's On Writing), I'm not usually one for meta-essays on writing - at a certain point, it's like, okay, stop talking about writing and let me just do it. But, for me, Zadie is always an intellectual exception - she could write an essay about snaking a clogged drain and I would highlight the shit out of it - and "Fail Better" is a piece I'll take with me throughout this marathon of a writer's life.