What makes a good writing habit? Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides sat down at The 2016 New Yorker Festival on October 7th to discuss. The two agreed that eight hundred words makes for a banner day. But Eugenides spends six to eight hours at his desk in a sitting, while Smith believes that her work goes bad after four. “A lot of the time for me was spent in anxiety or kind of nausea or fear, and that’s all been cut down,” she said. At Eugenides’s mention, she concedes that this might have something to do with being in therapy. “This is what New York is doing to me!” she said, with mock exasperation. She has also reckoned with her aversion to the first person, which she considers a distinctly British trait. “We confuse ethics and aesthetics very easily in Britain. We think there is something moral and grand and empathetic about writing in the third person,” she said. “It’s all nonsense!”
Eugenides said he prizes literature as an antidote to solipsism. “We got into this because we wanted to write from other points of view than our own, so everyone is resisting this idea that we can’t try to break the bounds of our little egos,” he said. But writing about other people’s cultures and lives, even with the best intentions, presents a new risk: error. Smith cited her “bad American prose” in “On Beauty,” and Eugenides recalled the “terrible fairy-tale village life” he wrote before researching the historical section of “Middlesex.” “There is no such place where you stand superior and have this easy move between cultures. I only have a curiosity, an interest, a love, and that’s it, really,” Smith said.
