It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Interpretation
Telling the honest beginning of a story can either sound ordinary or reveal too much personal emotion.
Zadie Smith suggests that the opening of a book carries complexities that may not resonate with readers. When trying to convey its truth, the narrative can either come off as mundane, lacking excitement and intrigue, or delve into deeply personal feelings that may not be easily shared with an audience, thus balancing between the everyday and the intimate is a challenging task for any writer.
In practice
When speaking at a literary festival, one might use this quote to discuss the challenges of storytelling.
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.
Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Don Quixote β I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
I am not going to get into it myself, except to say (1) if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings? and (2) thank you, geek girls! I love you all.
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