She recited lines from W.H. Auden’s “The Novelist:” The writer “Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn / How to be plain and awkward, how to be / One after whom none think it worth to turn,” Auden wrote. This is what it means to be a good writer, she tells her students: Give up attempts to prove their brilliance in every line and let their characters be silly, evil, stupid.
Zadie Smith on Writing, Reviewing, and Cultivating the Banal
