Zadie Smith gave a lecture at Columbia's writing program in March 2008 called 'That Crafty Feeling,' later collected in her essay book Changing My Mind. In it, she sorts novelists into two working styles, and she's specific about which one she is.
Macro Planners vs. Micro Managers
Smith's essay splits novelists into two working styles. The Macro Planner works from an outline built before a word of the actual novel exists: notes, structure, a plotted sequence of events, often sketched out across Post-its and notebooks. A Macro Planner can write scenes out of order, swap one ending for another, and move chapters around like furniture, because the architecture already exists apart from the prose.
The Micro Manager works the other way. Smith puts herself squarely in this camp. She starts at the beginning of a novel and writes forward to the end, without a fixed map of where the middle or the ending will land. The structure gets discovered inside the writing itself, sentence by sentence, instead of decided in advance on a notecard.
Smith is careful in the essay not to rank the two types. A Macro Planner isn't more disciplined and a Micro Manager isn't more inspired. They're just different relationships to uncertainty. The planner tolerates the uncertainty up front, during the outlining, and gets a smoother draft in exchange. The manager carries the uncertainty all the way through the manuscript, and the payoff, when it works, is prose that feels discovered rather than assembled. Her own novels bear this out. NW (2012) shifts between narrative modes chapter to chapter in a way that reads like a book finding its own form as it goes, which is consistent with someone who wasn't following a pre-built map.
Obsessive Perspective Disorder
Smith has a name, half-joking, for what happens to Micro Managers at the start of a book: Obsessive Perspective Disorder. The first twenty pages get rewritten again and again, not because the plot is wrong but because the voice hasn't settled yet. Which tense, which distance from the character, first person or third, present or past. She's called this stretch the hardest part of drafting for her type of writer, and she's said that once the tone locks into place, the rest of the manuscript tends to move with far less resistance.
Her advice for after a draft is finished follows the same logic. Put it in a drawer for as long as you can stand to before editing it, because you need enough distance to read it as something other than the person who just spent months inside it. See the full Zadie Smith writing routine for how this fits into her broader process.
What You Can Steal
- Name your type honestly instead of forcing a method that works for someone else's brain.
- If you're a Micro Manager, expect the opening pages to get rewritten many times before the voice settles.
- Don't read early-draft chaos as proof the book is failing. It might just be the tone still finding itself.
- Let a finished draft rest before you revise it, so you can read it with real distance.