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Friday Tyrant - Zadie Smith's Ten Rules for Writers Redux

Last year, the Guardian asked Zadie Smith for ten rules for writers. Blake Butler (the HTML Giant guy who wrote a good book) and I just got around to reading it and used the list as an excuse to talk about writing for an afternoon.

Last year, the Guardian asked Zadie Smith for ten rules for writers. Blake Butler (the HTML Giant guy who wrote a good book) and I just got around to reading it and used the list as an excuse to talk about writing for an afternoon. We’d like to thank Zadie Smith ahead of time for the impetus. This is nothing personal: We just can’t think of anything original to do, so we have to riff off of you. Please don’t crush us with your terrifying mainstream clout.

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1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
Gian: More than anything else? Damn. If you are still a child and are concerned with rules about writing on the Guardian website, then you’re already irredeemably fucked. Why aren’t you playing jacks or investigating your playmates’ genitals? This rule seems to be addressing the parents of a writer-to-be. Parents, just make sure your child has access to books and surreptitiously try to encourage reading, but don’t make them do anything. Chances are your child is not filled with the desire to become a writer when they grow up. He’ll most likely want to be a dancer or a food-cart guy. Don’t turn your child into a phony so early on. He will become one on his own soon enough.

Blake: I get the image of a kid with “DON’T FORGET TO READ A LOT OF BOOKS” scrawled on its arm in its own hand in those big weird block letters with the lines all falling off of one another. I like that this list begins with a rule you can’t follow if you didn’t already, like: Hey, the number one rule is be from Arizona. But yeah, spend more time doing this than anything else? I’m kind of into that—babies reading instead of eating or sleeping and passing out in their cribs. Knock any would-be writers off before they get a chance to touch a computer or a pen. Killing the future competition: smart move, Ms. Smith.

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2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Gian: I am with this hugely. I wish Ms. Smith could have just come out and said what she meant though, which was, “You should have a drink or do a couple of bong hits before reading your work and going in for an edit.” Personally, I have never been able to divide myself for any self-reflection, self-knowledge, or self-anything. I can’t magically become another person, or split myself into two people unless I go in for a drink or pull on a J.

Blake: I actually tried this one. I printed out all this crap I’d been typing on for several months and got it done up all nice and clean with a special binding at the FedEx/Kinko’s and hit the streets and found this bro who was a complete stranger and showed him my work. And he like spit up a little from the Frosty he was eating and it got all over the papers and I was trying to wipe it to clean it off and I was like, Friend, what did you think of my work, and he was like, “If that’s work, I’m Bob Dole. Why don’t you go throw yourself off a rope bridge, bitch?” I guess I could have tried to get a better stranger but seems like all the strangers I know only read like Craigslist and menus. Reading as my enemy worked a little better, though. I wrote "$$$$$ BUTTDETH AMERIKA TRICKFACE $$$$$" on the front page without opening it and then set it on fire and went and had lunch with my ex-girlfriend.

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3. Don’t romanticize 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.
Gian: I know that the “writer’s lifestyle” is the daddybear of clichés, but I am weirdly into romanticizing anything I can get my hands on. I have never understood what people mean when they use “romantic” pejoratively, and I don’t plan on ever wanting to. When I think of a “writer’s lifestyle” I think of a very fucking appealing lifestyle. Besides writing, the mythological idea of a writer’s lifestyle is made up of some interesting people, carefree living, late nights, a nip of insanity, good sex, usually music, and maybe some traveling. I jump at any and all of that as often as possible. I think a better rule might be to try as hard as you can to have the clichéd “writer’s lifestyle" -- especially if you aren’t a writer. At least you’ll have a little fun and, unlike most writers, you won’t have to suffer delusional thoughts of your own greatness. And: “All that matters is what you leave on the page?” Ms. Smith, I think you just might be a secret romantic.

Blake: I can’t just stop staring at this sentence: “You can either write good sentences or you can’t.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t? Well, shit, did that one count? Cuz damn, that sentence puts you on the No-No Team. And once you’re on the No-No Team, There’s No Coming Back! You either can hav sentenz or noez!

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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.
Gian: As for asking you to avoid your weaknesses, that is clearly an attempt at sabotage. How about not handing in a dialogue-heavy manuscript while you suck at writing dialogue, but why not try to become stronger at it? That seems like the more beneficial advice. I doubt that it’s the case here, but I have always been super-suspicious that writers who give writing advice are mostly giving out bad advice because they don’t want to tell any potential competition the real “rules” out of fear that the advised may take them by the collar in their own game.

Blake: So how does one know what one’s weaknesses are and how to avoid them? Like, at what point do you realize, “Bro, I am not *so good* at establishing setting furtively in my opening paragraph, so I will no longer do that.” Going back to when I first started seriously attempting to write when I was like 16 and thought Allen Ginsberg was the shit, I imagine I’d have thought my weaknesses were anything but faux-emo purple lyrics written in an attempt to get Jen McDade to think I was mentally hot, and therefore physically hot. Maybe if I’d stayed in that line by now I’d have written a badass epic love ode to Whitman called Cosmopolitan Greetings 2.

5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
Gian: OK, but I’ve never felt that such a clear line existed between writing and editing. Until the writing changes hands, that is. I know a guy who writes at least 16 drafts, from front to back, just constantly going forward. It’s obviously going to be different for everybody, but it seems like, for me, tons of editing happens during the writing. Like there’s a constant edit going on at all times, that all writing is is a constant editing, and what one calls the writing part is only the physical action of the pen on the page or the fingertips on the keys. I guess I can get what she means though. And I guess that’s why I get so little done. Maybe I should heed this rule.

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Blake: I think she just means "Don’t shit something out and assume it’s not shit cuz you’re so close to the shit you smell like shit too," which is fine advice in general, I guess. No matter what you make you are always going to come back to it seeing it differently later, because you’re a different person then. So sure, you can edit from the future in a certain way because there’s distance between you and your own special thoughts, which lets you edit like a reader rather than a writer, perhaps. On the other hand, I kind of like writing that seems to absorb the time it was written in, and is really manic and heavy for how it was put together in the moment, and sometimes coming back to that from too far away you’ll only mess it up. There’s a value in the messy elements of certain things, and sometimes you just have to let it go, because otherwise you’ll never be satisfied with anything. You change, it changes, shit is shit.

6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
Gian: Sounds like romanticizing the vocation again. I can understand the “be your own person” gist of this but I like the words clique and gang too much to encourage isolation. Like, what’s so terrible about writing with someone? (wink, smooch) Or learning from a certain school? Even as an individual, as soon as you latch onto a teacher or someone you might emulate in your early writing life, a clique is born. I can think of a certain “school” of today where a lot of the writers seem to go through a stage of writing in a “certain style” until they come out through the other side with a voice entirely their own. And a lot of them are some of the best we have. Gangs and cliques can just as easily be seen as a group of friends who help you through while you’re on the way to yourself, you know? Like, a lot of a certain teacher’s students at one time wrote in “that way” before they found themselves new and original inside of it and then stepped out completely on their own, reeking of no one but themselves.

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Blake: I’m sure there’s no way I can respond to this without someone accusing me of being in a gang. I can’t even wear my colors around my house anymore 'cause I’m always getting verb-bullets banged at my face from mothafuckas pulling GChat drivebys trying to get my gold. Really though, what is a literary clique? I mean, sure there are “schools” or whatever of writing, and voices might share similarities that get them grouped together, but having friends in this otherwise lonely practice has kept me in it, to whatever extent, or at least still with my head above water. Knowing other writers and talking about things with them can be energizing, though yeah of course it gets old, and only has so much place. If you are the kind of person who gets so influenced by being around others that your words get changed into theirs like you’re all made of Velcro, well, I don’t see you as having much of a chance of making much of anything that will have a presence beyond itself. A true “crowd” in the literary world usually has something to do with free beer.

7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
Gian: Or just close your browser. You can only rub one out so many times in a day (once every 30 minutes until you’re shooting spermdust or dry-gushing).

Blake: I know a guy who swears by this same rule. His name is Ted Kaczynski. If the internet really troubles your attention that much, here are some other things I suggest disconnecting from: family, friends, food, having a body, thinking, windows, sense of time, and God. Which yeah, sounds pretty sweet actually.

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8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Gian: This one is obvious. I mean, who wants to write with their mother rubbing their back and kissing their neck? Or his boyfriend bitching at him to not drink so much? Ideally, you’d have your own tower in somebody else’s castle with a gate only your penis -- or pussy -- print could open. But then there’s the view from the tower to distract you.

Blake: Protect it with what, a sword? I mean, I’m sure there are people out there in the world who will understand when you say, "Don’t F with me, I’m about to go in this room for five hours and play mental puppet games with my imaginary friends in language world, some hefty percentage of which I’ll probably never end up doing anything with but 'learning about myself and my craft,' while you stay in the other part of the house and keep quiet and feed our babies or think about the babies we don’t have and maybe will never have and learn to like it and oh make sure we have enough money so when I come back out of the room there’s a hunk of bread or something so we can enjoy it together in what’s remaining of daylight before I pass out of the sofa watching Top Chef and start all over again the next day until finally I 'give up' a day on some coming weekend to take you out and 'do us' while pretending not to be fully still in my head, in an attempt to make up for all the days I’ve spent in la la land erupting what-if’s, and no, no, never getting on the internet, not even a little, just me in here with all my sentences, OK?"

I mean, I’ve never found one of those people who understand all that. But some have tried.

I really wish this one weren’t true.

9. Don’t confuse honors with achievement.
Gian: I never have, possibly because I have never received any honors. But what’s even easier to do than that is to try and ignore the honors entirely. Or at least until you start to get them. It’s probably impossible to not care at all though. Honors with money attached definitely seem like the most important honors the most worthy of your attention.

Blake: Also don’t confuse achievement with self-preservation, or with people liking you, or with the idea that you’re a human, who when you go to Wendy’s will pay 99 cents for whatever’s on the 99 cent menu just like everybody else. Even the dude from Tool knew that everything you say isn’t being written down. Or he said he knew that in one of those songs I liked when I was 17. And that guy can supposedly suck his own dick.

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.
Gian: The truth? What’s that? A veil? Sounds Muslim. Or matrimonial. I asked a great writer one time about truth and what readers think is true and what readers think is not true and he said that only when the reader can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not, only then are you doing your job. That makes strongass sense to me. This last line though sounds awfully romantic and very “writer’s life” again. If demanding sadness and dissatisfaction from the life of a writer isn’t romanticizing the “writer’s life,” then nothing is. Come on. You’re a romantic. Just admit it. It’s OK. The clique I’m in is totally romantic too.

Blake: I’m assuming she means “the truth (to you),” with the “to you” assumed like the assumption that is always attached to all these overbearing statements: Nothing is really true unless you believe it, which returns us again to the idea that all this writing stuff is just make it up as you go along and make it sound right and try to delete yourself as much as possible from wherever you’re getting it, which isn’t inside you really, but everywhere else. Which is bullshit. I couldn’t be more unsatisfied than when writers start pulling out that old goddamn Beckett quote, "Ever tried try again fail again fail better" whatever yadda yadda thing he wrote when he probably couldn’t have been more at the end of his rope (and I love Beckett). But yeah, playing the never-satisfied card is fun for writers because it’s the only way out sometimes. There seems to be very little gray area between kissing your own ass and pretending like you hate everything you’ve ever done, which is probably what all writers are always in the middle of, both at the same time. Which is why it’s fun and why it’s messy and why we two stinkers would bother to comb over every single word of what the assuredly well-meaning and probably chill and cool Zadie Smith meant when someone asked her to write down a few things that might be helpful to somebody interested in pursuing the craft she’s become well known for practicing. Shame on us. Shame on her, too. Shame on the Guardian. Shame on VICE and everybody else. Shame on shaming. Shame shitty stand dfdfu audifu olusdfuliuasdf.