You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
Interpretation
Writing short stories allows for more authentic characters to emerge, unencumbered by heavy symbolism.
In this quote, Zadie Smith reflects on the unique qualities of writing short stories as opposed to longer narratives. She suggests that the brevity of short stories frees writers from the constraints of constant allegory, enabling them to focus on genuine human experiences and emotions. This approach allows for the creation of more nuanced and authentic characters who resonate with readers on a deeper level.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared this quote to emphasize the significance of short fiction in capturing real emotions.
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.
When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'
Color transmits and translates emotion.
I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
Good music is very close to primitive language.
But I really resist categories – that naming is a closing down of meaning. Women's art, political art – those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.
Unlike sport, music is not about winning or keeping fit or promoting your town or school; it's about celebrating, to a level approaching ecstasy, the deepest human longings.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.