What if you don't got the smarts to write a novel?

Chekhov was a doctor. Kafka was a lawyer. Lewis Carol was a mathematician. What hope have you got?

No, seriously. For anyone considering the risky leap to become a writer, it’s probably worth considering whether you’ve got what it takes. Not in terms of gall, resolve, self belief or perseverance. But in strictly physical terms.

Is your brain big enough for this monster task?

Are you the mental equivalent of a pro-athlete?

If you want to see success, realistically that’s what you need to be. Right?

You are attempting to enter a field that requires you to perform mental gymnastics in multiple modes of complex thinking after all. If we took a sabre saw to your skull and lifted the hood on your mind, would we find a high performance machine?

If you don’t think we would….well, we’ll get to that later.

(If all this chat about brain size and intelligence seems like it might just devolve into a eugenics lite rant, relax, I promise that’s not where I’m taking it).

The Good News.

Before you feel too attacked by this line of questioning, it’s worth considering that most people who do possess those neurological pre-requisites don’t wind up becoming novelists.

Rather than outcompete you on the typewriter, these mental giants tend to self select into more stable professions.

That’s the smarter thing to do after all.

Great, so I’m essentially saying that any of us who do manage to survive the baby-turtles-on-a-beach dash to “make it” as a writer are on the B team? Any success we manage to claw for ourselves is caveated by all the smart folks having prefiltered themselves into finance, law and medicine? Is that the only reason we’ve got a fighting chance?

Not exactly. Sensible career choices aside, the case I’m making here about the brain isn’t based solely on IQ. This isn’t me holding myself up as an elite member of the intelligence class, nor is it a wallowing manifesto on my own deficiencies.

There’s no guarantee that a few extra RAMs of brain power would translate to higher quality writing.

Too much logic has a way of stepping on plot. Once they’ve passed beyond a certain threshold of practical reasoning, words tend to read in a flat cadence. The act of following a creative thread with no guaranteed destination requires a quality of foolish confidence and unwarranted patience that is independent of conventional intelligence. This isn’t the territory of strict book smarts. And of course there’s the whole aesthetic side of prose writing that requires talents for observation and seems to require access to mental states that are non-local to the frontal lobe.

In short: Big Brain doesn’t automatically equal Good Writing. Straight As don’t automatically equal “Successful Writer.”

Yet I maintain my point that there are physical pre-requisites that determine whether you’ll be up to this task or not.

Memory and Processing Power

See the thing is, I’m convinced neither you or I have got a big enough brain between us to write an entire novel from scratch.

Physically.

I’m not saying you can’t think. I’m not even saying you’re not smart enough. I’m talking about something very specific here. Forget creativity. Forget the ability to self motivate in the face of sparce results. When it comes to calculating complex plot lines and networks of character interactions, I’m convinced there are few among us who have the chess grand master chops to wrestle all of those variables in our heads at once. I’m convinced that you don’t got the smarts to write a novel.

And I’ve got proof because I attempted to do all the above.

When I took a year off work to focus on writing full time, I planned to treat my days like an eight hour shift at any regular job. That way, I’d improve rapidly and get an incredible word count logged every day, right?

I tried it. It worked. But it came with shades of torture.

Strangely, it wasn’t the schedule that I found difficult. I love writing and the mental strain of problem solving. It was the stopping that got me. Once I’d come out of any of those marathon writing sessions, I found I had no mental energy for anything else. Even winding down was a struggle. Talking to people, listening to music, watching TV? That all required the mental juice I’d already devoted it to the work. So I was left with this semi-catatonic state of grey, until I’d gone for a long walk, worked out, slept eight hours and rejuvenated myself sufficiently to do it all over again.

(Anyone working a regular job is probably pausing right now and thinking, “Yea that sounds like a standard work day. Cry me a river.”

I get what you’re saying, the 3 pm slump is as real as the 8 pm and haven’t left the office yet slump, but this was a different thing. This was closer to post exam fatigue. You know? Back in high school or university when they’d schedule two three and a half hour exams on the same day, because: “hey, pressure is good right? It’s only your entire future riding on this.”)

But this is the exact type of tangent that was responsible for the mental burden I’ve described above, so let’s get back to my point.

For all it’s difficulty, my eight hour writing schedule was fine for the short term (and probably a necessary process to go through before I found a better way). By integrating forced breaks, non-sleep-deep-rest and putting a time cap on how long I’d allow myself to write, I eventually found a way to manage my “ordinary work day” with less of the burnout. I introduced the equivalent of a fan cooling your overheated laptop, laptop being grey matter in this case. But even with these adaptations, I was probably still on the fast track towards a mental breakdown had I attempted to maintain that clip for an extended period of years.

Was this proof that my mental makeup is simply not cut out for the task of writing a novel?

I don’t think so.

I didn’t have a system yet. That’s all. I was an amateur with an inefficient approach to my work¹.

This meant I was attempting to hold everything in my head, I was constantly calculating beyond the scope of my immediate plot requirements. I hadn’t yet learned to outsource the thinking to the page and let it prompt me when required.

It was all in the brain, not on the page.

This may be a trap unique to the alternate-history genre that I was writing in, but on top of the standard fumblings of the amateur writer, I adding some extra undue strain by taking Hemingway’s ice-burg method of world building to the extreme. Rather than following the thread of the plotline in front of me, I accounted for niche societal details of my story’s world which were probably too buried to be picked up by even the most attentive reader and even if they did get picked up, were only rewarding from a “hmm that’s clever,” perspective rather than offering any overarching relevance to the plot itself. The return on investment of these research tangents was not worth the trouble, so I could have spared myself the effort.

These days I devote fewer hours per day towards thinking out ideas but a much higher percentage of my writing time actually ends up in the final product.

Now I appreciate my personal experience isn’t necessarily proof of concept. Perhaps this is just me scaling my personal failures into into universal truth. Perhaps there are some geniuses out there who can juggle all the variables of a complex novel in their minds and go on with their day afterwards.

Harking back to this article’s title: perhaps some people do got the smarts to write. But this begs the question.

Is that type of brain power even necessary?

The intelligence of the novel.

Agree with me or not. I maintain that no man, woman or child can conceive a fully fleshed out novel idea and write it out verbatim (at least not an idea with any depth)

Yet novels get published every day, so how do we account for that?

The brain is only a small element of the process, the intelligence of the novel takes care of the rest.

I’m sure any reader who’s dabbled in a creative field of any sort has had the experience of visualising their masterpiece, yet the moment they attempt to execute it, the end product turns out to be something entirely different. This is caused by an imbalance between the vision and the craftsmanship of the artist. They’re not technically skilled enough to play the notes they’re hearing inside their head or perhaps the perfection of the idea lies in it’s abstract nature and simply cannot be replicated by the physical tools mankind has come up with so far to express them.

But every effect has its opposite.

In writing, a rudimentary concept can be elevated by the execution process. I can’t speak to whether this is true for other mediums, but in the fiction realm, the act of putting pen to page or typing immediately turns the work from a passive activity into an active one and alters the vision that prompted it².

The thought informs the work then the work informs the thought, which allows further thought and morphs that idea into something more complex and often better than the one that prompted it.

I know this sounds a bit mystical, but it’s not really. When forced to put thoughts into words, the mind has no choice but to get more specific, to hone down the broad argument into clear points. In fiction it takes a general vignette of characters interacting and demands that the author pin down specific emotional threads and follow them down a specific path. The abstract becomes particularised, an umbrella becomes a narrow lane.

Suddenly, the millions of variables which only a super computer could process, are cut down to a select number of truths. The master novelist takes the paradox of choice that would drive the amateur author mad, and outsources it to the story itself. Their wisdom lets them recognise this greater source of wisdom and they allow the story to choose where it wants to go.

Through this process, the great writer is freed from the burden of running triage on competing narrative threads. On the prompt of the work itself, they apply their highly trained eye to identify the most true of those reduced choices and follow their thread to the only option.

Going back to the question of the mind and the size of the brain, I hope it’s now clear, that no one has the capacity to write that novel in a vacuum. It takes interaction with the work to recognize all the threads that do not need to be thought through.

The intelligence of the novel is where this filtration process takes place, not inside your head. Not between your skull walls. Your brain isn’t capable of that.

That’s why you don’t got the smarts to write a novel.

Promo time:

While I appreciate some of you might not want to commit to a full month by month paid subscription here (which I understand) perhaps you’d like to support me in a different way. I’ve just set up a buy me a coffee account which allows you to do this. My hats on the ground, I’ve just sung my song slightly out of key, it’s okay if you want to keep walking. I get it. But if you wanna toss in a coin that’d be nice.
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1. I was like a white belt using all their strength to bench press a person off them when a well timed hip escape would have returned much better results with no energy, this is probably too niche an example to land, hence the footnote.

2. I may even go as far as saying, that in writing, the act of execution more often improves on the original concept than detracts from it. But that’s speculation.