I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Interpretation
The author expresses a disdain for structured creative writing classes and highlights a personal approach to writing.
In this quote, Zadie Smith reveals her belief in the value of personal experience and instinct over formal education in creative writing. She implies that the pressure and structure of classes may hinder genuine creativity, suggesting that writing is a natural, individual process that should not be confined to rigid frameworks.
In practice
During a workshop on writing, I shared Zadie Smith's quote to spark a discussion on the value of personal style versus formal training.
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 can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.
The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.
Play is a child's work and this is not a trivial pursuit.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.
Knowledge gained through experience is far superior and many times more useful than bookish knowledge.
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