Are you Intelligent Enough to Write a Novel?
Be Brilliant and No One Will Care
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Email“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of (poor fiction),” –Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the (poor fiction) in the wastebasket.”
The key to great fiction is streamlining your story. Cut the fat! Some of the greatest authors of all time have said that the best additions they made to their novel were the parts they deleted. Somewhere along the line, in their writing career, they achieved objectivity. Somewhere along the line, they arrived at the idea that not all of their words were golden. Somewhere along the line, they realized that some of their words, sentences, paragraphs, and even some of their chapters were simply self-indulgent, wastebasket material. These self-indulgent portions, or the “ninety-one pages of (poor fiction),” of any novel are usually found in the asides.
But asides are what we enjoy in every novel you say. Asides can provide setting, pace, and drama. Asides can also build suspense and fortify the characteristics of a character, but they can also kill your novel. Most asides are unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. As anyone who has read a novel can attest, most novels could be written in forty pages, but that’s a short story, and short stories don’t sell as well as novels. They don’t sell as well, because readers love asides. Readers don’t usually want snapshot stories. They want a world. They want to know the humans that they are reading about. They want to see them breathe, they want to hear them talk to an employee at a Kwik Shop, and they want to feel the steps they take from place to place. They want to know the minutiae of the human they’re reading about, but they don’t want to get so caught up in the minutiae that they’re taking off pace, and they don’t want to read a self-absorbed writer that thinks it’s all about them.
“I’ve met a number of intelligent people throughout my life, and I’ve met a number of people I consider brilliant. I’ve met very few that were able to combine the two.” –Unknown.
This desire to be perceived as smart is a strong driving force in all of us. How many stupid and overly analytical things do we say in one day to try to get one person to think that we’re not a total idiot? This desire to prove intelligence is right up there with the drive to be perceived as beautiful and likeable. It’s right up there with the desire to be seen as strong, athletic, independent, and mechanically inclined. We spend our whole lives trying to impress people. Even those who tell us that they don’t care what others think are trying to impress us with the fact that they don’t care.
In my first era of writing, I wrote a lot of these self-indulgent asides that contributed little to the story. I was a new student to the world of politics, and I was anxious to show the world what I learned. I also wanted to show that half of the world that disagreed with me how wrong they were. So, I put my character through an incident, and I had him come out of the incident enlightened by my political philosophy. In various other pieces, I wanted to inform the world of all of this great underground music I was experiencing. My thought process at the time was: “Hey, Stephen King can get away with it. Why can’t I?” I wanted people to see both sides of my brain in the same venue. After taking a step back, and rereading these novels, I achieved enough objectivity to realize that it was all a big ball of mess.
If I was going to clean this mess up and start writing good stories, I was going to have to divide my desires up. I would have to discipline myself to the creed of all storytellers: Story is sacred. I learned to channel my desire to be perceived as smart in political and philosophical blogs. My desires to have people listen to my underground music were channeled away into Amazon.com reviews, and my desire to tell a story was devoted to the files that contained my novels and short stories. In this way, I was able to proselytize on the role of the Puggle in our society today, and the absolute beauty of Mr. Bungle’s music, without damaging my stories or boring the readers of my stories. I learned the principle the esteemed rock band Offspring was trying to teach the world when they sang: “You gotta keep ‘em separated.”
There’s one writer, whose name I will not mention, that never learned this principle. This author presumably got tired of being seen as just a storyteller. This author knew he was intelligent, and all of his friends and family knew he was intelligent, but the world didn’t know. The world only knew that he was a gifted storyteller, and they proved this by purchasing his books by the millions, but they didn’t know that he was so much more. This author achieved as much in the industry, if not more, as any other writer alive or dead (It’s Not King!), but he remained unsatisfied with that status. He needed the world to know that he wasn’t just a writer of fiction. He needed the world to know he was as intelligent as he was brilliant, and he wrote the book that he hoped would prove it. It resulted in him ticking off 50% of his audience. 50% of his audience disagreed with him, and his politics, and they (we!) vowed to never read another one of his novels again. This is the risk you run when you seek to be perceived as intelligent and brilliant in the same work.
But politics makes for such great filler, and to quote the great Thomas Mann: “Everything is political.” Well, there’s politics, and then there’s politics. If you’re one of those that don’t know the difference, and you don’t think your politics is politics, you should probably write something political. If you’re one of those who wants to write politics simply because it makes for great filler, however, then you should try to avoid the self-indulgent, tick off half of the population politics. You’ll anger some with this, you’ll bore others, and the rest of us won’t care that you think it’s vital that your main character expresses something in some way that politically validates your way of thinking. We will just think it’s boring proselytizing from an insecure writer who needs validation from their peers. Stick to the story, we will scream, as we skip those passages or put your book down to never read anything you’ve ever written again.
You will need to be somewhat intelligent though. You’ll need enough intelligence to know your punctuation and grammar rules, you will need to know when to make paragraph breaks, and you will need to know how to edit your story, but these aspects of storytelling can be learned.
“I am not adept at using punctuation and/or grammar in general…” A caller to a radio show once informed Clive Barker. She said that she enjoyed writing, but it was the mechanics of writing that prevented her from delving into it whole hog. “Are you a proficient story teller?” Clive asked her. “Do you enjoy telling stories, and do you entertain your friends with your tales?” The woman said yes to all of the above. “Well, you can learn the mechanics, and I encourage you to do so, but you cannot learn story telling. The ability to tell a story is, largely, a gift. Either you have it or you don’t.”
Be brilliant first, Barker basically said, and if you achieve brilliance, you can learn the rest. You can gain the intelligence necessary to get the thumbs up from a publisher, an agent, and eventually a reader, but you cannot gain brilliance. You cannot gain artistic creativity, and it’s hard enough to prove artistic brilliance. Why would you want to further burden yourself by going overboard in trying to also prove intelligence, and thus be everything to all people?
Let the people see how brilliant you are first! Gain a following. Once you have achieved that pied piper plateau, you can then attempt to display your intelligence. The preferred method of achieving all of your goals is to ‘keep ‘em separated’, but there are always going to be some who need to prove their intelligence and brilliance in the same Great American Novel. Those people are going to say Stephen King is a much better example to follow to the best-seller list than I am, and he achieved his plateau with a little bit of this and a little bit of that sprinkled in his prose. The question you have to ask yourself is, is he the rule or the exception to the rule? If Stephen King’s model is your preferred model, and these political and music parts are so germane, so golden, and so uniquely special to your story, keep them in.
As Oscar Wilde says, “You might as well be yourself, everyone else is taken.”
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"Those who will succeed in life never need to be told," --Stella Adler to student Charlton Heston when Heston complained that she congratulated everyone in the class on their acting abilities except him.