What Makes a Good Writer? (originally written by Zadie Smith)

Illustration by Garrincha

Writing as inauthenticity

Here is another novelist, in another email, answering the question: “How would you define literary failure?”

“I was once asked by a high-school student in an audience in Chennai: ‘Why, sir, are you so eager to please?’ That’s how I tend to define failure — work done for what Heidegger called “Das Mann”, the indeterminate “They” who hang over your shoulder, warping your sense of judgment what he (not me) would call your authenticity.”

That novelist, like me, I suppose like all of us who came of age under postmodernity, is naturally sceptical of the concept of authenticity, especially what is called “cultural authenticity” — after all, how can any of us be more or less authentic than we are? We were taught that authenticity was meaningless. How, then, to deal with the fact that when we account for our failings, as writers, the feeling that is strongest is a betrayal of one’s deepest, authentic self?

That sounds very grand: maybe it’s better to start at the simplest denomination of literary betrayal, the critic’s favourite, the cliche. What is a cliche except language passed down by Das Mann, used and shop-soiled by so many before you, and in no way the correct jumble of language for the intimate part of your vision you meant to express…