Curiosity, Bold Living, and Learning from Surprise
Write with curiosity, live with boldness, and let surprise be your teacher. — Zadie Smith
Curiosity Starts the Sentence
Zadie Smith’s injunction begins with the engine of all creative work: curiosity. Rather than writing to confirm what we already know, curiosity urges us to write in order to find out. In “That Crafty Feeling” (2008), Smith distinguishes between macro planners and micro managers but ultimately implies that a book teaches you how to write it only if you keep asking questions of the page. Curiosity, then, is not idle wandering; it is an active, investigative posture that turns hunches into structure. Once we treat a draft as a laboratory—where hypotheses are tested and discarded—what seemed like writer’s block becomes fieldwork.
Boldness Turns Discovery into Action
However, discovery without daring rarely changes a life. Boldness is the willingness to follow curiosity’s leads out of familiar rooms and into unknown streets. Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1580) modeled this move, transforming personal experiments—on fear, friendship, and failure—into a literary form. Likewise, boldness is less bravado than commitment: you decide, publish, ask the harder question. In practice, it means risking an unpopular draft, a difficult conversation, or a new direction. Consequently, bold living feeds bold writing, because a writer who ventures out returns with material no desk alone can supply.
Let Surprise Be Your Teacher
To link curiosity and boldness, Smith invites a third partner: surprise. In cognitive science, learning accelerates when outcomes diverge from expectations; dopamine neurons fire on “prediction error,” updating our models of the world (Schultz, Dayan & Montague, 1997). Surprise, then, is not an interruption but a syllabus. It tells us where our maps are wrong and where growth hides. Rather than resisting that jolt, we can greet it as feedback: the scene took a turn, the plan failed, the conversation revealed an unknown motive. Each upset, if examined, graduates us to a truer understanding.
Serendipity’s Proven Track Record
History repeatedly shows how accident instructs excellence. Alexander Fleming’s messy petri dish yielded penicillin (1928), because he paused to ask what the mold meant rather than discarding it. At 3M, Spencer Silver’s “failed” weak adhesive later became Post-it Notes when Art Fry leveraged it for bookmarks (1974). Literature follows suit: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) embraced digression and found a form in so doing. The pattern is clear—serendipity favors the observant. By honoring the unexpected, creators convert error into method and detour into design.
Practices That Invite the Unplanned
Accordingly, we can structure our days to make room for surprise. Constraints like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (1975) force lateral moves; Julia Cameron’s morning pages in The Artist’s Way (1992) lower the bar to catch stray insights. Fieldwork also helps: take research walks, eavesdrop ethically in new neighborhoods, or reverse-outline a scene to notice what the draft chose without you. Even small experiments—switching tools, reading outside your genre, trying a one-take session—tilt the odds toward discovery. Over time, these rituals cultivate a mind alert to deviations that teach.
Boldness with Humility and Care
Yet boldness needs ballast. Without humility, it hardens into recklessness; without empathy, curiosity becomes intrusion. Research on curiosity and openness suggests they correlate with greater tolerance and perspective-taking (Kashdan, Curious?, 2010). Therefore, the bravest stance is also the most receptive: seek edges, but listen; test assumptions, but protect people; question, but revise when evidence arrives. This ethical posture keeps surprise from merely shocking us and instead converts it into shared understanding—a learning that benefits more than the learner.
A Daily Refrain for Creative Living
In the end, Smith’s line reads like a daily rhythm: ask, act, and attend. Begin in inquiry, step forward with courage, and when the world answers unexpectedly, treat that answer as instruction. The cycle repeats, refining both the work and the person making it. With such a rhythm, even ordinary days gain the texture of adventure, and the page becomes a place where life and craft learn from each other in real time.