Zadie Smith teaches 10 practical and poetic rules of writing

In 2010, The Guardian reached out to various authors asking for their best tips on writing. English novelist Zadie Smith, who penned the likes of White Teeth and Grand Union, responded with a cogent and practical set of guidelines.

But years prior to delivering those rules, Smith had broken down the personality of writers, generally speaking, into two categories: the Macro Planner and the Micro Manager. The dichotomy is as helpful as her rules.

You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskines he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure — all before he writes the title page.

This pre-planning, Smith said, allows for Macro Planners to feasibly start writing a novel in the middle or even backward. There’s freedom that accompanies fastidiousness. It also allows for the writer to swap out an ending here or a climax there, or altering characters on the fly.

But Smith herself is not that organized. The Macro Planner to her is incomprehensible and horrifying. She instead is a Micro Manager, which entails a brick-by-brick approach and editing-as-you-go process.

I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels.

While Micro Manager writers have to deal with the tribulations of perfectionism — not being able to write another page or start a new section until the current one is done — Smith said she would take this approach any day. Good writing isn’t easy anyway, she noted, so there’s no harm in struggling through mental stalemates or being forced to think of fresh angles as you go.

And the ultimate benefit Micro Managers enjoy, Smith said, is that the last page of the novel is the last page. No rewrites or second drafts.

10 rules for writing

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Complement this reading with John Steinbeck’s lessons on discipline as a writer, Ernest Hemingway’s advice on a literary career, and Henry Miller’s insistence on focusing on one project at a time.

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