In February 2010, The Guardian asked a run of novelists, inspired by Elmore Leonard's famous rules, to write their own. Zadie Smith's list of ten has circulated online for more than a decade since, mixing practical discipline with something closer to a confession.
The List Itself
The Guardian's rules-for-writing series ran in February 2010, with contributors including Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel alongside Smith. Her ten rules move between the practical and the personal, and condensed, they read like this:
- Read constantly as a child, more than you do anything else.
- Read your own adult work as a stranger, or an enemy, would.
- There's no 'writer's lifestyle,' only what ends up on the page.
- Avoid your weaknesses, but don't dress up self-doubt as contempt for them.
- Let real time pass between writing something and editing it.
- Skip the cliques and writing groups. A crowd won't fix your sentences.
- Draft on a computer that's disconnected from the internet.
- Protect your writing time and space, even from people you love.
- Don't confuse honours with achievement.
- Tell the truth however you can, and expect to stay a little dissatisfied.
The Two She Comes Back To
Two of the ten show up again and again when Smith talks about her process elsewhere: the internet ban and the boundary around her writing space. Rule seven says to work on a computer disconnected from the internet, full stop, not to just use it less. In later interviews she's talked about backing that rule with actual blocking software, because knowing a rule and holding to it under pressure turn out to be different problems.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Zadie Smith, 'Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,' The Guardian (2010)
That's rule eight, and it's an unsentimental thing to say about family and work sharing a house. It doesn't promise the people around you will understand the boundary. It just tells you to hold it anyway. For how these rules play out day to day, see the full Zadie Smith writing routine.
The rest of the list isn't instructions so much as attitude. Rule three says there's no such thing as a writer's lifestyle, only sentences that work or don't. Rule nine says not to confuse honours with achievement, advice that reads less like it's aimed at beginners than at someone who's already collected a shelf of prizes and knows how little that settles anything. Rule two asks you to read your own finished work as an enemy would, which is a harder discipline than it sounds. Most writers can manage a stranger's detachment. Reading as an enemy means hunting for the sentence you were hoping nobody would notice.
What You Can Steal
- Pick one rule and make it non-negotiable, not just one you like in theory.
- Put an actual gap between writing something and editing it, even a single day.
- Treat 'protect the space' as a boundary you enforce, not a preference you mention once.
- Expect the dissatisfaction to stick around and keep working anyway.