Questionable Audience

Zadie Smith- That Crafty Feeling

(I hope this is still literary and not too far off from the analytical perspective.)

What follows is a version of a lecture given to the students of Columbia University's Writing Program in New York on Monday, March 24, 2008. The brief: "to speak about some aspect of your craft."

This disclosure makes me wonder… Why the focus on Micro and Macro planners? A writer, seeking to gain insight on writing, may be confused by such a broad portrayal of writing. What does it mean exactly to hone on these two distinct styles of the writing process? And how the hell is it supposed to help? For me, it was confusing. A lecture for a writing program. To speak about some aspect of your craft… Very interesting.

In her language, she favors the micro planner and criticizes the macro planner. Perhaps this is because her identity lies with the micro planner and not the macro planner. Therefore she cannot truly mesh herself into the positives of the macro. At least to the extent she does with the micro. How does this help a lecture for writers though. I assume all writers when reading this. Here she talks about the macro planner:

I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters and perform frequent- for me, unthinkable- radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example or changing the title. I can't stand to hear them speak about talk about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people's methods are always so incompressible and horrifying.

So why are you trying to comprehend this? Is it not a lecture? Maybe it's as she says, because although she doesn't understand it, its not necessarily a bad thing, just horrifying to her. So than she goes on to discuss her own style:

I am a Micro Manager. 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.

Etc. Etc.. So "speaking to [her students, (in this case us)] about some aspect of [our] craft" means she is speaking to us about our craft in her mind.

Now, on the positive side, she uses a great sense of humor and points to EXACTLY where she wants her readers to focus on.

You can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight. It is the only absolutely twenty-four-karat-gold-plated piece of advice I have to give you. 

But than you sort of doubt her credibility with the next sentence…

I've never taken it myself, though one day I hope to.

Or do you doubt her? Because writers make mistakes. After mistakes. And then more mistakes.  So her advice comes from her mistakes. Right?

But why is this all in a lecture? To show she knows what she knows because she has made the mistake many writers make, and wants to offer help? Or is she stating the inevitability of mistakes? That they will happen regardless of any anecdotes. We must learn to cope with our slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune and make it into the art we know how.

At least that's what I understand from this piece. A very interesting place to enter her book.