Changing the Whole Nature of The Thing: Zadie Smith on Some Aspects of Craft

I’m nearly finished the first draft of the novel I started in June, and I keep thinking about Zadie Smith. Specifically about her lecture, “That Crafty Feeling” (2008), where she describes two breeds of novelists: Macro Planners and Micro Managers. These are ugly words, as she says herself, but they usefully describe two methods of approaching the ordeal of writing a book:

“A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot, and creates a structure — all before he writes the title page. Because of this structural security, he has a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices.”

Zadie Smith herself is a Micro Manager:

“I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose between three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea what the ending is until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels.
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“Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line. When I begin a novel there is nothing of that novel outside of the sentences I am setting down. I feel I have to be very careful: I can change the whole nature of the thing by changing a few words.”

For the Micro Manager, the first twenty pages of the book are “a kind of existential drama, a long answer to the short question: What kind of a novel am I writing?” The risk of this approach is that the first twenty pages can become “a pile-up of too careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the twenty-page mark is passed.”

How about a house building metaphor to make the difference between these two types especially clear:

“Macro Planners have their houses basically built from day one and so their obsession is internal — they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers like me build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.”

Not my type

I keep thinking about this because I’m not sure which type I am. I plan in only the most basic sense, with only the roughest of ideas about the kind of novel I want to write and about the protagonist and their journey. Start at the beginning, continue to the middle, and finish at the end. The house of my novel is in no way built when I begin, and I’m still trying to figure out what style of furniture I want. Actually, even coming to the end, I’m still not quite sure if it‘s a townhouse, a McMansion, a chalet, or a shack in the wrong part of town (it’s a bit like playing M.A.S.H.). Would dwelling on the first twenty pages help me figure that out?

I charged through my first twenty pages and did not look back. Did not edit what I wrote the day or the week before, because how else do you write sixty thousand words in two months with only an hour or two a day? Revisiting and obsessing over anything slows me down and cuts into my breakneck speed typing time. Make a note of the problem, the gap, the thing I‘ll need to think about later, and then move the hell on. I know I‘m going to rewrite it all later, so what‘s the point of trying to rewrite it in pieces, instead of waiting for when I have an idea of what kind of surgery the whole thing will need? (Reconstructive, extensive, excessively risky, with an intense recovery period.)

The final few thousand words

Obviously, I don‘t need to fit either of Zadie Smith’s types. I can write my novel however I want. But I still keep worrying, just a little bit, as I face down these final few thousand words, these last few scenes, that I‘ve gone about this all wrong.

Of course I’m questioning everything I’ve done to get here. Because why not. What I’ve accomplished is just not good enough. Could be better. Could make more sense, have better sentences and paragraphs and chapters. Better character names, more character names. (Fun fact about this draft: the protagonist does not yet have a name; she goes by A.) Could be so much more than what I’ve made of it.

But this doesn’t help. Here’s what I really have to say: I’m almost finished another first draft. It’s easier and it’s harder than the first two and a half times. Different but mostly the same. I doubt it’s going to get better until I really and truly face down the revision process. It’s going to be much harder than getting down a lot of words every day. More things are going to change more often than I can imagine, and I’m probably going to change them back again before I revise it again. And that’s going to be fine.

But not until after I take a vacation. Drive across the eastern bit of this mighty continent, stand on some rocks to look out at the ocean and breathe in the salty air, and drive back again. We’ll see what that will do for me.

Doubt and interrogate

Maybe I shouldn‘t be reading lectures and essays like this when I‘m in the thick of writing. They make me doubt, just a little, that I‘m doing it right. But that doubt can be good, because it keeps me out of the bubble. Keeps me thinking about the parts beyond the story itself, the bizarre reality of what I‘m making with all these words. I do think that helps.

Zadie Smith’s whole lecture is worth the read for anyone embarking on the thrilling voyage that is writing a novel, if only to interrogate the usefulness of the question of aspects of craft and decide that there is no one right way to go about any of it. A little bit of everything seems true. It just depends on the day.

Scaffolding

I‘m going to end this with a part of the lecture that gives me comfort at this stage and which I hope to remember when the time comes:

“When building a novel you will use a lot of scaffolding. Some of this is necessary to hold the thing up, but a lot isn’t. The majority of it is only there to make you feel secure, and in fact the building will stand without it.
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“I use scaffolding to hold up my confidence when I have none, to reduce the despair, and to feel that what I’m doing has a goal, some endpoint that I can see. I use it to divide what seems like an endless, unmarked journey, though by doing this, like Zeno, I infinitely extend the distance I need to go.

“Later, when the book is printed and old and dog-eared, it occurs to me that I really didn’t need any of that scaffolding. The book would be far better off without it. But when I was putting it up, it felt vital, and once it was there, I’d worked so hard to get it there I was loath to take it down. So my advice, if you are writing a novel at the moment and putting up scaffolding, well, I hope it helps you, but don’t forget to dismantle it later.”