Some advice for all those hasty young people wanting a book deal.

Zadie Smith, Zadie Smith. Among book people she’s one of our new beloved writers of the past decade–and the subject of much envy for her success at such a young age. She’s beautiful, intelligent, and has an incredible speaking voice. It’s hard not to fall in love with her on first sight and after listening to her talk–a refreshing experience for any serial literary event-goer–I would go so far to say that anyone not enamored of her probably has deep character flaws. She recently gave a lecture up at Columbia entitled “On Feeling Fraudulent.” As much as her lecture gave great realistic advice to emmerging writers it also shed quite a bit of light on herself, a somewhat reluctant public figure. I remember going to a PEN festival event two years ago and watching her walk onto stage after Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison. She reached the podium and squinted out at the audience and said, “I really shouldn’t be up here.”

I’m trying to get my hands on a transcript of the lecture she gave at Columbia for you, but they’ve probably already attached all kinds of rights to it, so I’ll just share her best piece of advice, though far less eloquently. On the subject of finishing a novel (or for those writers out there squeamish about the N-word, “a piece”), Smith said you should “step away from the vehicle.” Put it in a drawer. Do not publish it–do not even read it–until you absolutely have to. The most important reader of your work is not yourself who has written it, or an editor who has seen ten drafts of it already, but a complete stranger, and if you can keep the thing in a drawer long enough chances are that you’ll become that stranger yourself.

Of course, Smith said about this advice, which was given to her by another writer: “It’s really great advice that you should take. I intend to take it…maybe next time.”

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