Strange Methods: Zadie Smith's First Twenty Pages

How revising the opening can finish your novel

photo by Chris Boland

Note: this post is part of a series on different writing processes. The previous entries are Michael Moorcock's 3-Day Novel and César Aira's "Flight Forward."

If there’s a central thrust of this newsletter, it’s that fiction is an infinite machine that can produce infinite objects and be created in infinite ways. As such, I like to h…