Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules For Writing Fiction

Discover Zadie Smith’s 10 rules for writing fiction and find out what this acclaimed novelist can teach you about improving your writing.

Zadie Smith is a British novelist born on 27 October 1975. She is best known for writing White Teeth, On Beauty, The Embassy of Cambodia, and Swing Time.

White Teeth won several literary awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in both 2003 and 2013.

Here are her 10 rules for writing fiction.

Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules For Writing Fiction

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

The Last Word

Zadie Smith’s rules offer practical advice for writers at every stage of their journey. From developing good writing habits to learning how to approach your work, her insights remind us that becoming a better writer takes time and discipline. We hope her advice inspires you to keep writing and find your own way of telling stories.

Source for 10 Rules
Source for image: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zadie_Smith_NBCC_2011_Shankbone.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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