Discovering a new author is always an incredible experience, especially when you become so engrossed in their writings that you can’t put it down. Zadie Smith was that novelist for me this year. The book has been awarded numerous awards and prizes like the Whitebread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. It has also been translated into twenty languages. She is also the author of The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and her recent novel which will be released soon, Swing Time. Her portfolio also includes several short stories, and she is currently a tenured professor of Creative Writing at New York University.
I stumbled across the writings of Ms. Smith while searching for various resources on how to improve myself as a writer. What I found was a written version of a lecture that she gave at a writing program at Columbia University called “That Crafty Feeling”. She talked about two forms of stylistic writers, “Macro Planners” and “Micro Managers”. She stated that “A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page”, whereas “Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line”. I immediately identified myself as a micro-manager, and was enlightened by that revelation. Smith went on to break down how other people’s words and writing can influence your own writing, noting that this can have a critical impact on some writers. This essay helped improve as a writing and also was influential on how I approach the editing process, which was always difficult for me.
Idolizing an author from a distance is one thing, but getting a chance to sit in the same room with them is a whole other experience by itself, so imagine my excitement on hearing that Zadie Smith was visiting my college to give a reading. “An evening with Zadie Smith” was what it was called, a night filled with euphoria and anticipation on hearing from the author herself. Her reading was taken from her short story, “Two Men Arrive in a Village”, which left you emotional and speechless. As an immigrant myself, I’m always interested in the writings of immigrant writers. Zadie says, “But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance”. During an election where there’s so much disheartening rhetoric of immigrants and immigration, it’s important to have from such an influential author out there. Zadie Smith is a fundamental novelist, whose books should be in your hands, on your bookshelves, and in your library.
