Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestratheyll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when Im too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when Im syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.
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About Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith was a contemporary British writer. Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, was an immediate best-seller and won a number of awards. Read more on Wikipedia →