For you writers toiling away at your day job, heed the advice of Zadie Smith: “Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.” Wait, what? There has to be some satisfaction in this! Write to us about the simple pleasure that you find in the craft. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Advice from Zadie Smith”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
We talked earlier about writers who have to earn a living by writing in a genre other than their preferred one, like the novelist who has to write a technical manual by day.
And Grant, the larger question is, you know, writing is such hard work, and if you’re spending so much energy and effort doing that kind of writing for pay, how do you get back the joy of writing?
And I’ve been reading a lot of writers on writing lately, and it’s almost like they say, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you.
Oh, that’s terrible.
I mean, I have the words of Zadie Smith ringing in my ears. She says, resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Oh, yeah.
And I read something by Neil Gaiman where he said, chasing perfection is like chasing the horizon. You will never get there. At some point, you just move on.
Yeah.
But, you know, we do keep trying. What keeps bringing us back there, and how do we get the joy back?
Part of it, and what I’ve read, is that some writers feel that they are the only people who can say that particular thing that needs to be said.
And if you feel like you are driven, that you have cacowithi scrabendi, which we’ve talked about in the show before, right?
Oh, very nice. Very nice.
If you have this unassailable, unquenchable need to put a story down, then that’s what carries you through these moments of self-doubt, the moments of panic, frustration, and even just pure tiredness with your subject.
Yeah. And I think too, it’s sort of like life. You don’t really have to have a huge success necessarily. You can have those little moments here and there, you know, a little favorite sentence that you crafted. For some writers, it is enough to make a perfect book that their family loves or their peers respect, and then they’re done. They don’t need to have a career that’s filled with 40 or 50 novels and all the best interviews and all the best reviews and million-dollar advances and that sort of thing.
And so if you set your expectations to something just above where you are, you will find yourself a little less frustrated.
And we should flip this around and say there may be people who are writing novels that actually have found joy in writing insurance documents, right? They have discovered that this mundane craft can be a place for them to experiment or to get out this urge or just to feel like they’re perfecting how word A follows word B.
This basic fundamental craft of putting a sentence on a page and knowing that you’ve done it exactly right.
We know that you’ve gone through this. We know that whether you’re a professional writer or an amateur, whether it was for school or for yourself, you’ve had these moments where you’ve wondered why you were doing what you’re doing.
Could you finish it? Should you do more of it?
We’d like to hear your stories. How did you finish what you were working on? Did the novel happen? Was the article taken to press?
Email words@waywordradio.org.
