Zadie Smith On Disappointment

In an interview found on youtube, I heard Zadie Smith say something I can’t shake. She was describing that moment when she’s writing a novel and hits the “point of no return” as she called it. She doesn’t elaborate on what that is, and I can only surmise she means when you’re deep enough into a project, having invested the kind of time and energy that makes quitting even worse. She said you always, at that point of no return, find yourself looking at your manuscript and feeling a sense of overwhelming disappointment with what you’ve written. That what you’ve written doesn’t begin to match up with what you had hoped, what you had originally envisaged would be your masterwork. The crap you see on the page, I’m paraphrasing here, a cry so far from what you had hoped it to be you actually want to cry. And maybe you do. Or in my case click disgustedly away from the Word document you’re on back to some social media tab you have open so as to focus instead on the sorry state of the world, or the fame of the famous, or the inane of the brainless.

Smith says it is contending with that very disappointment that is the essence of what it actually means to be a writer. In other words, that the disappointment is inevitable. This from a novelist whose first novel alone, White Teeth, won four literary prizes. The British author is not suggesting this is what plagues only the young or new writer. I don’t think this was up for interpretation. Smith was describing her feeling in the present. The interview, a few years old, given after she had already published five novels, two collections of short stories and two works of non-fiction.

The revelation for me, that a writer of that calibre, of that talent, who has received the endless accolades she has, would still, some ten books into her career, be as prone to doubt as us unknown writers. Better still, that it’s not the avoiding of the dissapointment that is the goal. Rather it is the grappling with it. It is the recognizing its inevitably. You will hit the wall. You will think you suck. The work will reek of something amateurish and crap. What Smith is saying is, ok, it sucks. It’s lame. It’s simple or cliched or boring or unimportant or whatever other self-doubt you (I!) bring to it. So how do you make it better whilst accepting it isn’t likely to ever reach the heights of whichever great writers you thought you might possibly match up against and so clearly don’t?

I’m thrilled by this! Which is odd, no? To be told that the dissapointment is unavoidable, that it is a constant, that you will never escape it and to be happy about this. But I find it helpful. Because the self-doubt is in many ways the very essence of the creative act, which itself is such a lonely thing. So it’s nice to have company in my misery. Smith doesn’t go so far as to say you need to embrace that suffering, she somehow instead helps me to shrug my shoulders while I get despondent. So that now, white I still of course regularly turn away (like umpteen times an hour) from my current manuscript in horror at the meh I have spewed all over how many pages, I return from Twitter that much faster, and spend just that little bit less energy and time on the anxiety, churning that shit instead into some semblance of an effort to turn my meh into slightly less meh.

Onwards and upwards.