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Originally Posted by gmw
Thanks for that, I love some of the rules - although the last sentence is rather depressing to have said out loud. (I find it's one of those things best to admit privately, saying it aloud doesn't help - like spending too much time thinking about mortality.)
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I differ with Ms. Smith's interpretation of being unsatisfied. In my view, the feeling of being dissatisfied with one's work is an incredible thing. It means that the excitement of
approaching perfection will always be with you.
If you can see how short you fall of perfection without beating yourself up about it, and if you can focus on your own progress without comparing yourself to great writers in ways that
don't help you learn, then you're a tightrope walker, an aviator, and you're always traveling somewhere higher. I love being a flawed writer who aspires to perfection, because it really is the best of both worlds. What's the alternative -- to have no room for improvement? Now that's depressing.
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This bit from the interview: "But writing, I actually feel, is considerably less magic. It’s a lot of work and a lot of daily grind, where reading is a true pleasure." is curious - and sad. I wonder if it was like that at the start, and if not, why did it change.
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Zadie S. seems to be expressing the humble fact of writing as work: it requires sustained daily effort and isn't exalted in comparison to other kinds of work.
She voices that idea in a way that can seem sobering, but I hear the tone as I do in her fiction:-- she's being both humble and empathetic. She's contextualizing herself and her project in a world of other people who don't do the particular thing she does.
She's also saying that, as long as the magician is invested in creating magic, they aren't necessarily in the position to sit and savor it. W. H. Auden said it another way: Every poet has to have a good gardener, which is to say, an aspect of the personality that pares down the style and form, and isn't impressed by the so-called magic. You can be a ridiculous megalomaniac and think you're a genius half the time you're writing, but eventually, you have to be able to cast a cold eye on the drivel you've spewed -- a prospect which I always find amusing and at least as fun as brainstorming through the rest.
My sense of her approach is that it helps her to clear her head. After all, she was and is a singularly beautiful literary celebrity who wrote some short stories at Cambridge which came to the attention of a publisher and an agent before she'd even written her first novel. Ever since the publication of
White Teeth, she's been celebrated in the British media like a rock star.
I'm a former full-time studio musician. For most of the actual rock stars I've worked with, humility isn't so much a virtue as a foothold on sanity. People around them often encourage every strange or ridiculous idea they express, which isn't helpful. Most people can't think about a famous person's work critically without manifesting some distracting and, eventually, tedious reaction (pos or neg) to the
position of the work rather than the work itself. That never seems to help them gain any perspective!