![]() ![]() I think of reading like a balanced diet if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. ![]() My writing desk is covered in open novels. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra-they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. As they write, the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one will ever write again. They don’t even want to see the cover of a novel. Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. The following is excerpted from Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays and first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter- sign up here. ![]()
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