everything flows freely into you, dice doña Smith

Leí esto hace algunos meses en el blog de Celibelle. Me pareció chévere. Cosas veredes, Sancho, pensé. Y entonces lo olvidé. Hace algunos días, cuando llegué a mitad de la primera parte de mi proyectito matutino, salí a ver una película con A.M, y me dije, coño, esto está directamente relacionado a lo que estoy escribiendo. Línea que, al llegar a casa, me recordó este pedazo que pongo a continuación. Es un fragmento de un ensayo (de esos de auto-ayuda literaria que se dan en los talleres literarios o en los MFAs americanos) de Zadie Smith, titulado That crafty feeling acerca de su escritura. Gracias otra vez a Celi, por conseguírmelo.

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical centre of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post—I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. You sit down to write at 9am, you blink, the evening news is on and 4,000 words are written, more words than you wrote in three long months, a year ago. Something has changed. And it’s not restricted to the house. If you go outside, everything—I mean, everything—flows freely into your novel. Someone on the bus says something—it’s straight out of your novel. You open the paper—every single story in the paper is directly relevant to your novel. If you are fortunate enough to have someone waiting to publish your novel, this is the point at which you phone them in a panic and try to get your publication date brought forward because you cannot believe how in tune the world is with your unfinished novel right now, and if it isn’t published next Tuesday maybe the moment will pass and you will have to kill yourself.

Zadie Smith, That crafty feeling