That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
Interpretation
Fiction writers are shaped by their unique perspectives, which can seem unusual to others.
This quote by Zadie Smith highlights the intrinsic nature of fiction writers and their creative process. It suggests that the qualities that may appear alarming or unconventional in writers are not merely eccentricities, but rather the natural outcome of their distinct cognitive and emotional frameworks. Writers perceive the world differently, and this unique outlook is what enables them to create compelling narratives.
In practice
In a literary workshop, discussing the creative process of authors.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
You know, I designed the Queen crest. I simply combined all the creatures that represent our star signs-and I don't even believe in astrology.
I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.
Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity.
Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.
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