Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides on Writing

(piano melody)

I've spent this summer asking a lot of my good friends

who are writers, like, how many hours a day do you write?

Because I've always sat down, like, most of the day,

whether it's useful or not, I think that I have

to stay in my writing room for like, six,

you know, six to eight hours.

And then I was surprised to learn

that many writers, whom I admire,

only write for about three hours a day,

in a very concentrated burst.

I've always, the one I always think about is Graham Greene

who wrote from nine 'til 12 and then drank.

That was his official, that was his decision.

He would drink from 12 to five and work from nine to 12.

Better than the other way around.

Right.

500 words a day, mapped on a graph,

and then drink from midday onwards.

And he wrote a lot of books.

Like, there's more than 25 books.

I don't, I think when I was very young,

I could write, maybe, sometimes you'd write

two and half thousand words, right?

It seems ridiculous to a journalist who does

that on a daily basis, but I,

since I've been a grown woman, I don't think I get,

ever, beyond 1,000; it's more likely to be 500.

And it's never really more than three to four hours.

I don't have any more than that, now.

Even if I wanted to go further, I couldn't.

Do you, if you have as much time as you want,

do you have a word limit, though?

Or do you just do it by--

I think if you work beyond four hours, it goes bad.

When I'm working well, I try to write 800 words.

Yeah, and that feels like a champion day.

That seems good, yeah.

You want people to congratulate you

as you come out of your room.

Instead of just roll their eyes and like,

where is dinner?

I think a lot of time, for me, was spent

in anxiety or kind of nausea or fear,

and that's all been cut down.

I'm in therapy just like you are.

I know it's been helping you.

It does help.

You wrote your last book quite easily,

because of therapy, right?

This is what New York is doing to me.

I know, me too.

And I'm only in New Jersey.

(laughs)

The anxiety about a sentence, like, getting so caught up,

I think I was very liable to do that.

And a certain fluidity, and oh, this book is

in the first person, and Jeff's read it, and he knows,

and I think my main block was with the first-person.

Which, therapy is a part of, but I also think

it's a British and American difference.

I was thinking about it recently,

trying to write about the different between

the first and the third person,

and in England, you are taught from a really early age

that Shakespeare is the greatest writer

who ever lived, and the second thing you learn about him

is that he was the great artist of the impersonal.

That he never said I; he says everything.

He is everybody.

He is no one in particular.

He has this kind of negative capability,

and I think it sinks in to British writers quite deeply.

As a literary value.

The idea is you should--

He writes plays, does he?

Because we don't hear about--

Yes, some plays.

Wrote some plays, 400 years ago.

And I think we confuse ethics

and aesthetics very easily, right?

In Britain, we think there's something moral

and grand and empathetic about writing in the third person.

I think I was very much under that delusion

that somehow, if you write in the third person,

you're less self-preoccupied, less egotistical,

and it's all nonsense.

So you felt like you were cheating,

if you wrote in the first person, in a sense?

I think, I was always lecturing my students,

I realize, now, you know, they'd write in the first person

and I'd just say things like, well,

fiction is about other people, and about otherness,

and I didn't really understand the power

that the first person has.

Shandra Rhymes said: I do whatever I want.

I write about whatever I want, and the only thing

I worry about is you have to get it right.

And she that, but of course, whatever I'm writing,

if I'm writing about a white person,

it's a black woman writing about a white person,

it's a black woman writing about,

you know, whatever character she's dealing with.

Every writer I know, well, I don't know about every one,

but we got into this because we wanted to write

from other points of view than our own.

So everyone is resisting this idea that we can't try to,

to break the bonds of our little egos.

As I was as a child, very curious

about other people's faiths, other people's lives,

and under the sign of love and interest,

I wanted to bury in, when I wrote The Autograph Man,

I was very interested in Jewish life.

I'd been surrounded by it in the area in which I lived

and I wanted to know, I was curious, wanted to be in there.

So the risk, obviously, is error.

And I make so many errors, in On Beauty, there's all this

bad American prose.

In White Teeth, I'm sure there's

many mistakes about Bengali life.

So the risk is ridicule; there's ridicule.

I've written ridiculous things,

but it's under the price of interest.

I was interested and I wanted to do it.

So I don't mind getting things wrong.

I had that feeling that I could write about anywhere,

and when I started writing Middlesex,

and I was writing the historical portions,

in 19, you know, 1922 in Asia Minor,

I didn't do any research at all, into it.

I just thought--

That's bold.

I was at Yaddo, I was at Yaddo,

and you know, I had, they were giving me food

and I had a room, so I thought:

I can write about Asia Minor.

And I just plunged into it.

And I wrote the most terrible like, fairy tale village

life of Greeks; I knew nothing about them.

It was, I knew it was not going well,

but I still thought, it was my failure of imagination.

I should, you know, that's what the problem was,

and then, I came out of my room, one day,

and there was a book sitting on the table,

and the title was Smirna, 1922.

Someone had left it there.

It's like, a history of, and I thought:

maybe that would help, if I,

if I read something about what I was writing about.

So I did realize that sometimes you have to--

It does help.

I used to have so little respect for experience that,

as a subject.

You definitely can write about anywhere,

but those pages, any reader will see the flatness.

There is no perfect ethical status,

identity that you exist in.

That doesn't exist.

It would be wonderful if it were true,

but there is no such place where you stand superior

and have this easy move between cultures.

I only have a curiosity and interest,

a love, and that's it really.