What Novels Taught Me About Writing
That writing is a joke. Take Fuccboi for instance. There’s no paragraphs. It’s just paragraphical sentence after paragraphical sentence. Then there’s stuff like Infinite Jest, where he would go on crazy tangents and write long sentences with no punctuation and search the English Oxford Dictionary to baffle you with word after word you’ve never seen before or will ever see again after.
There is also Ulysses, where he chooses different styles. There’s no plot I can decipher unless I were some literati or had to know in an obsessive way. Then there’s something like Les Miserables, clear as a bell, some of the best writing I’ve ever read with a straightforward chronological story that makes sense. But then Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a ridiculous novel that made absolutely no sense, I couldn’t even tell there was a story and I had no idea what I was reading 99% of the time.
Lolita and Catch-22 both tried to be as fanciful as possible and they achieved their goal. George Meredith also tried to be fanciful and failed, at least to me. I read him carefully and couldn’t make sense of any story, so full of purple prose was his book. It was excruciating. Bouvard e Pecuchet, Flaubert’s last novel, was nauseating. He kept ramping up the same theme over and over until I felt sick. Madame Bovary showed me how good a novel could be if an author labored painstakingly over every word.
Ambrose Bierce hated the novel. He called it a short story full of fluff. He was right and if you ever have the pleasure of reading his short stories you’ll know he was right. I’ve never read short stories as good as his. His ghost stories are among the best. His execution story, hauntingly beautiful. A genius who saw the vanity of a long book.
War and Peace. Some parts were great. Then there was a longwinded argument against the great man theory at the end. It could have been something entirely different. A thousand-page cautionary tale.
Going a bit modern now, with Haruki Murakami. He taught me you can go ahead and write creepy things and write about women throwing themselves as dorky men and no one will bat an eye. Nothing can be too absurd as to hold an author back from doing whatever he wants. Huysmans taught me you can use a novel as an excuse to ramble about any topic you feel like. Dorothy Sayers taught me you can start a novel out great and absorb the reader then lose their interest permanently. So many novels start off magnificently then break apart in the middle and reach terminal velocity by the end (looking at you Neal Stephenson).
Stephen King’s novels taught me cheap tricks and illogical insertions of fantasy can ruin a good idea. Also, to make fools of your enemies by putting words in their mouths.
Some novels can be allegorical or philosophical, but frankly, I don’t care and it doesn’t matter. Like Albert Camus’s The Plague. So what that it was an allegory of occupied France, I liked the story for what it was. It ruined it for me that it was an allegory. Or like when I realize a sentence in Ulysses refers to some piece of literature. When I recognized one, I thought “Oh… that’s it?” It was a letdown. Like a woman taking off her pants and showing the butt you thought was round and tight is flabby and cellulitic. Oh, and authors make up whatever words they fancy.
When William Faulkner tried to put me in the head of a mentally disabled person I was mad at him. I’m not here to experience your experiment. But he did it anyway and people praised him for it (or hated him, I guess). Sometimes we like the impossibly difficult, like Henry James and sometimes we prefer the least resistant text, like Ernest Hemingway. I think Hondo by Louis L’Amour was as good as anything Hemingway wrote.
I think by the end of this, and there are many more authors I could cover, I’ve read around 700 novels, mostly classics, but by the end of this if I could leave you with anything, it’s that a novel is a part of the author. Every novel is the mind of the man or the woman who wrote it. What I love about books is how so many of them are written and made up whole cloth by one person. One person wrote it, now one person, me, is reading it. Then I would tend to get tired of reading different novels by the same person. When I read the works of Evelyn Waugh I began to tire of his style that I once found refreshing and sharp. Or by the time I got to the latter books of the Dune series I was all Duned out. Few authors are much different from book to book. I also realized I hate reading series. By the 10th Tarzan book I was completely tapped out. The first Tarzan is worth reading, the rest are pure garbage. Same goes for Princess of Mars. First book, excellent classic science fiction. I think I tapped out on the eight book in the Barsoom series, but I was bored a few paragraphs into the second book The Gods of Mars (I used to force myself to read through series and things back then, so young and foolish I was at 37).
Authors can be crushingly boring. Half of Gore Vidal’s novels nearly brought me to tears of boredom, but the other half was well worth it and memorable. I often find authors who have had interesting or difficult lives to give the best material, but it is not always so. My brain fell asleep a quarter of the way into Shantaram. A lot of modern writers lack a certain oomph to their writing. It’s like they lack real life experience, or an intensity of experience. I think authors used to be revered for their ability to penetrate the veil of existence by bringing memes and observations to life through stories. Nowadays its whether or not something can sell. We get our super awesome descriptions of life through Joe Rogan and Timothy Ferriss long-form podcasts. Or dare I say Jordan Peterson, a bafflegarble intellectual, self-proclaimed.
Novels teach us that there is no one way that works. Robinson Crusoe may have been the first English novel, but it sucked. Badly. I think if you read Robinson Crusoe you may as well write your own novel. Every person should write an autobiography and a novel. Don’t worry, no one’s going to read you any more than people read Sinclair Lewis, once touted as a great American author (Elmer Gantry is fantastic by the way). Go ahead, though, write. I’m writing a fiction and I’m even attempting to be pretentious with it. I’ve never enjoyed a novel written to sell well, so I’m not going to write something like that. I don’t even care if in the entire novel my character never gets out of his head. Because it doesn’t matter. Creative writing can only be creative if you let yourself out of whatever boxes your school teachers put you in. That’s why I like Medium, I can write whatever I feel like, be it good or bad. Do you waste your time by reading me? You waste your time doing almost anything anyway, who’s to judge which waste of time is more wasteful than another?
