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Writing Tips
The Qualities and Duty of A Great Writer
Lessons from Zadie Smith on authenticity, betrayal, and failure in writing
In her essay “Fail Better”, Zadie Smith gives us “The tale of Clive”. Clive aspires to write the perfect novel, and seems to have all the skills to do it:
“He’s intelligent and well read; he’s made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong; he has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory — those elegant blueprints for novels not yet built — and is now ready to build his own unparalleled house of words”
So he begins. He writes. And three years later, Clive has finished his novel. But it’s not the perfect novel he had envisioned:
“It is, rather, a poor simulacrum, a shadow of a shadow. In the transition from the dream to the real it has shed its aura of perfection; its shape is warped, unrecognisable”
Although it's hard to articulate, Clive believes his character Maria Gomez, who’s central to his theme of corruption within American identity politics, doesn’t drive home his point of the deflated American dream. And he didn’t use her marriage to represent “Marriage” with a capital M, he could only seem to write of her singular experience.
