“I write very slowly, and I rewrite continually, every day, over and over and over…. It’s a continual process. Every day, I read from the beginning up to where I’d got to and just edit it all, and then I move on. It’s incredibly laborious, and toward the end of a long novel it’s intolerable actually.”
What then ultimately brought her back to fiction, she was asked.
“There are little sparks of something like actual life,” she said after a deliberative pause, “and I don’t think an essay could ever create that friction, that feeling of being alive. And when you’re a kid, that’s why you read, and some people forget that, but for me that feeling of the fake-real, the almost-real, I get pleasure from thinking I could do that.”
Zadie Smith on ‘little sparks of something like actual life’ and her latest, ‘NW’
