22.2.11

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical center of the novel. By the middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being a part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post--I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she's sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semicolon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. You sit down to write at 9 a.m., you blink, the evening news is on and four thousand words are written, more words than you wrote in three long months, a year ago. Something has changed.

...

Magical thinking makes you crazy--and renders everything possible. Incredibly knotty problems of structure resolve themselves with inspired ease. See that one paragraph? It only needs to be moved, and the whole chapter falls into place! Why didn't you see that before? You randomly pick a poetry book off the shelf and the first line you read ends up being your epigraph--it seems to have been written for no other reason.


-Zadie Smith, "That Crafty Feeling"

1 comment:

rosebriar said...

Yes, yes, yes.