Tag: smart

Stuck in the Middle with You

RilalyLeave a comment

“I’m smart. Not like everyone says. I’m smart, and I want respect.” –Fredo from The Godfather. I love this quote, as anyone who has ever read this site knows. I use it so often that I use it so often, too often, because it just seems to be an evergreen quote that fits so many of my themes. It’s an everyman quote. It’s one of those quotes that if we don’t say it every day, we probably think it. We know we’re not able to figure some things out, but we’re able to figure out a mess of other things, so that should make us smart right?  

What is smart, intelligent, or knowledgeable? It’s a question loaded with so many variables that it’s the literal definition of a loaded question. There are so many forms of human intelligence that it takes a lot of intelligence to understand the definition of intelligence. We all have some figurative schemes of thought that we use to develop images for matters of discussion. If I were to ask you what the elite intellectual looks like, you automatically picture the white lab coat. Researchers conducting tests on individuals know that if they want their subjects to take them seriously, they need to have a closet full of white coats. Ear, nose and throat, family practitioners probably also have a closet full of white coats they wear to presumably put an end to us complaining that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Depending on their goal of leading us to assume they’re smart, they might also want to mess their hair up (a la Albert Einstein), exhibit poor social skills, and thet should probably look like he doesn’t spend enough time outside. Our local car mechanic doesn’t fit any of these bullet points, however, but if you’ve ever sat down with one of them, you know the best and brightest among them have such a wide array of intelligence of their profession that it can be humbling and disorienting to hear them go on. That’s pretty relative you might argue, because we all have our areas. That’s kind of the point though isn’t it? If a man in a lab coat has a spark plug go out in his engine, he’s as lost as the rest of us, and the epitome of relative definition of intelligence. We all have our areas that make us feel smarter than most, but we eventually run across something, someone, or some other person place, place, or thing that makes us feel pretty darn dumb.   

Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met also had another key ingredient that is in short supply: clarity. They not only have a clearer vision of life than the rest of us, they have wisdom based on experience. They’re not afraid, intimidated, or confused by questions, arguments, or refutation. They’re able to roll with the punches, because they’ve already argued with so many people that they know every possible argument for and against. Yet, before we consider those with greater clarity intelligent, we have to consider another variable of intelligence: sensitivity. Most clear-minded people I know suffer from some deficits in emotional intelligence. They know the truth as they’ve experienced it and seen it, but they don’t account for all of the variables that could undermine their version of the truth. Can something be true, if it is only true 99.9 percent of the time? If an emotionally intelligent percent invites anecdotal evidence that undermines that truth, is it still true? There are times when it seems clarity and sensitivity seem to be combatants in the pursuit of truth, intelligence, and knowledge. Most clear thinkers are so lacking in sensitivity that they almost seem robotic, and they view arguments against their views as an attempt to cloud the truth and add confusion, but they don’t alter their views one iota.  

The more succinct definition of intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. That definition might lead us to seek all of the varying definitions of knowledge, and how we apply it. It doesn’t serve a purpose, but some of us have retained more knowledge about the NFL, from the 80s and 90s, than most of the experts on pregame, NFL shows. Try to stump us. Go! Some of us know more about the show Seinfeld than anyone we’ve ever met. Say what you want about such knowledge, but it is information that we’ve retained, and in some cases used, or applied, as we’ve dropped the show’s jokes in a timely manner that has impressed people. Is it smart though? Will our audiences consider that intelligent? Our friends probably consider retention of such information the definition of intelligence, but how many strangers, who didn’t grow up in the same era we did, will put that information/knowledge on the same level with the man who is intimately familiar with Shakespeare or Chaucer? If you’re anything like me, and you enjoy searching for seemingly impossible answers to questions, you’ll probably end up saying, “I honestly don’t know if I’m smart or dumb. I’m probably Stuck in the Middle with You.” 

“Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am stuck in the middle with you
When you started off with nothing
And you’re proud that you’re a self-made man.” –Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan

I’ve met a wide array of writers throughout my life. Some of them exposed for me the difference between the creative term brilliance and the more math and science definition of intelligence. I’ve met brilliantly creative writers who were so good that I was just plain jealous, which led me to try to outdo them with a long stretch of writing. I’ve also met a number of writers who knew the craft so well that they gave me some excellent pointers and valuable information that I still have in my head whenever I write. They knew the ABCs of writing so well that it was a little surprising to learn they were actually average-to-poor writers. When I see them now, I call them editors. Editors can spot all of the errors of the creatives, and their approach to writing can be so oriented in fact that it takes all the fun out of writing. Most of them don’t do it to be mean, better, or correct, it’s just the way their mind works. They’ve learned the craft by studying the masters, and if we run into a wall, they can provide helpful advice based on their studies. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but most of them don’t know their limitations. It seems to me that they know masters’ masterpieces, so well that they wouldn’t dare approach the craft in an innovative manner that might violate the tenants laid down by those they deify. They know the masterpieces far better than jokers to the right, and they’re paralyzed by idea that if they can’t top them, why try? Those of us who aren’t as familiar with the literary canon might be dumb enough to think we have something to add to the conversation. Even if we don’t come anywhere close to what editors determine to be quality material, we don’t lie awake at night in fear of a clown from the right dropping the dreaded ‘D’ word, derivative, on us.       

Those of us stuck in the middle with you grew up on KISS, and heavy metal, and we loved the silly, simplistic movies and shows from the 80s and 90s that knew how to get to the point. If we were to ask members of that generation (my generation) I suspect that most of them would say, “It was a pointless era, but who cares, it was built on being fun, funny, and entertaining.” Whatever point these entertainers had, they got to it quick, because they feared belaboring a point might lose them their short-attention span, key demo. Those stuck in the middle with you have those influences loaded in our neurons, firing our synapses. Is that a brag? Some of the songs, shows, and movies from that era were quite innovative, creative, and influential, but no one would confuse memorizing the lines of dialogue from Buggs Buggy and Gilligan, or studying the lyrics of KISS, with an intellectual exercise. Yet, when we combine all of that silly simplicity with an appreciation for the masters of literature, we end up somewhere in the middle.

Those of us in the middle “Started off with nothing”. The “Theys” of our lives helped us form a foundation by teaching us the elements of style, and the rules, but they couldn’t teach us how to deviate. Those deviations defined us in many ways, ways that led us to be a self-made man when it came to writing. We normally equate the term self-made man with success, but the self-made men who ended up anonymous failures are far more numerous. They just didn’t succeed. They were the dreamers who were so delusional they never paid heed to those who told them to give up, because they were making fools out of themselves. The term self-made man is a nebulous one that we could apply to high school graduates and “some college” applicants. We could apply it to artists, craftsmen, and small business owners who had to claw and scratch their way to some relative definition of success. The opposite of self-made man, arguably and debatably, is the college graduate. The college graduate is the product of at least four years of shaping and molding, until he establishes himself in the workplace or office. 

We could also say that the difference between the self-taught, or autodidactic, and the college graduate, or manualdidactic(!), is status. The mindset of the college graduate is that they’ve achieved status, and the self-made man is forever in pursuit of it. If we think about this dynamic in terms of the waiting room for a job interview, the college graduate believes he completed most of the interview on his resume, as he listed out the bullet points of what he did in college. He has achieved knowledgeable status, and he thinks the interview process will be paint-by-numbers after that. The high school graduate and “some college” applicant sits with inferiority complex believing that everyone else in the waiting room is a college graduate. His need to prove himself surely preceded his entrance into the building, as he apprenticed for the job doing grunt work in the field in question. Who will the head hunter in Human Resources view as more intelligent, knowledgeable, and the better candidate in the interview? It’s all relative to the head hunter, of course, but self-taught man knows that the onus will be on him to prove himself in the interview.

When we hear the self-made man talk about his pursuit of success, we often hear them make the dubious claim that, “Everyone was against me,” and/or “Nobody thought I would succeed,” but we could argue that such lines romanticize their struggle. More often than not, no one cared about them when they weren’t doing anything, because why would they? If they cared at one time, it probably took the self-made man so long to get there that everyone just sort of gave up on them. The self-made man probably had a lot of people cheering him on in the beginning, and that probably ignited something in him, but whereas they started giving up on him, he never stopped believing. The self-made man probably thought there was something to it, even when there wasn’t. Whatever stoked his desire to believe in himself took, and he continued to believe in himself regardless. Most of us don’t even remember the initial driver that spurred us onto further creations, but there is some inner drive to keep doing it. We’re the self-made, self-taught men who spend our time striving to prove that we’re not as dumb as our college transcripts suggest, and we are endlessly pursuing the sometimes-silly things we love with passionate zeal. 

In the craft of writing, over-the-top intellectuals are also handicapped by the Great-American-Novel syndrome. They can’t write anything that is anything less than the most important thing ever written. This is probably why they sit behind a blinking cursor for so many hours. They are profound thinkers who refuse to write anything common (“Don’t be common!”), trite, cliché, hackneyed, or banal. They prefer to dazzle with the unfathomably amazing, the intellectually illuminating, and that which is illustrative of the plight of mankind against the meaning of life. “Just write,” writing experts tell us. “I can’t,” they say. “I can’t think of anything.” They usually sit before those blinking cursors trying to come up with something so brilliant that it’s beyond brilliant. Then, in those writing groups, they criticize those who produce the common, trite, cliché, hackneyed, or banal, until they realize they share more characteristics with editors than they do writers. Those stuck in the middle with you don’t know what we don’t know, and we’re just dumb enough to think we might have something so entertaining we might eventually add a nugget that is enlightening.

“Get in, get pithy, and get out,” are the words we employ.

When we’re stuck in the middle with a quality author we get this sense that we’re joining hands with them as we walk with them on their path of discovery. If they do it right, it won’t be limited to just a facts based adventure. The quality author is still intimately familiar with being dumb on the issue, and we can hear the joy in their voice as they discover all this great knowledge. They know that fuzzy line between intellectual and dumb so well that they know how to tap dance on both sides, and we laugh right along with him. As much as we prefer to think we get it, whatever it is, we actually don’t most of the times, because we’re not as smart as those who do. We do enjoy the pursuit of knowledge, but we don’t enjoy hearing some professorial presentation from someone who knows the facts so well that they are all but reading them on a Teleprompter. Those of us stuck in the middle with you, on that fuzzy line between intelligent and dumb, are not so far removed from our misunderstandings of the world that we don’t take them for granted and no longer question the ways of the world anymore.

A Simplicity Trapped in a Complex Mind

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“That’s David Hauser,” my friend Paul said when I asked about a man who sat in the corner of the liquor store talking to himself. “He’s crazy, an absolute loon. Went crazy about a year ago. People say he got so smart that he just snapped one day, like that!” Paul added snapping his fingers.

I loved The Family Liquor Store, because I loved anomalies, and The Family Liquor Store was a veritable breeding ground for them. I knew nothing about anomalies before I started going to The Family Liquor Store. I thought I did, but the patrons there informed me that I had no idea. I knew people who succeeded and others that failed, but my definition of the two measures was relative to my dad’s. We considered his friend’s promotion to department store manager the pinnacle of success. I knew as little about the definition of success as I did the depths of failure and despair I encountered in the liquor store owned by my friend Paul’s parents, where Paul was employed.

Even while immersed in that world of despair, I encountered pride, coping mechanisms, and lies. A customer named John told me that he once played against Wayne Gretzky in a minor league hockey match, Jay informed me of the time he screamed “Go to Hell JFK!” to the man’s face, and Ronny told me of the various strength contests he won. The fact that I flirted with believing these tales informed the regulars in The Family Liquor Store that I was as hilarious as the fools that told them.

“Why would they lie about things like that?” I asked to top off the joke.

“Wouldn’t you?” they asked when they reached a break in their laughter. “If you lived the life they did.”

The unspoken punchline to this ongoing joke was that I might be more lacking in street smarts than any person they ever met. The answer to the question that was never asked regarding my standing in their world was that a thorough understanding of their world could be said to be on par with any intellectual study of the great men of the book smarts world, in that they both involve a basic understanding of human nature.

“You see these guys here,” Paul’s father confidentially whispered to me on another day at The Family Liquor Store. “I could introduce you to them, one by one, and they’d tell you wild stories of success and failure, but the one thing you’ll hear, in almost every case, is the story about how a woman put them down. They all fell for the wrong woman.”

Knowing how this line would stick with me, I turned back to him in the moment, “What’s the wrong woman?” I asked.

“It varies,” he said. “You can’t know. All you can know is that you don’t know, because you’ll be all starry-eyed in the moment. Bring them home to meet your dad, your grandma, and all your friends, and listen to what they say.”

I met a bunch of fussy fellas, since hearing that advice. Some of them wouldn’t even look at a woman below an eight, on the relatively superficial scale of physical appearance. Others looked for excessive class, intelligence, strength and weakness, and still others were in a perpetual, perhaps unconscious, search for their mama. For me, it’s always been about sanity. I’ve dated some phenomenal women throughout my life, and I’ve also had an inordinate attraction to that sassy mama-who-could-bring-the-drama, but when those ultimatums of increased involvement arrived that sage advice from Paul’s father wormed its way into my calculations. I wouldn’t limit this warning to women, however, as I would put just as many men through the FrootLoopery index I developed for those with whom I choose to surround myself.  I did this, because as much I like crazy, and I do enjoy their company in near-spiritual manner that could only be called a like-minded bond, I did not want to end up in an incarnation of my personal visage of hell, otherwise known as The Family Liquor Store, where it appeared a wide variety of bitter, lost souls entered, but none escaped.

For all of the questions I asked in The Family Liquor Store, and I asked a ton of them, there was one question that I dare not ask: Why would a normal family, with normal kids, want to open a liquor store on the corners of failure and despair? I never asked this question, even as a young man with an insufferable amount of curiosity, because I knew that the answers I received would reveal some uncomfortable truths about the one who answered. One harsh answer I learned, over time, was that if we surround ourselves with failure and despair, we feel better about ourselves and our meager place in the world.

“How does someone become so smart that they go crazy?” I asked Paul, still staring at David Hauser, the man who appeared to be having full-fledged conversations with himself.

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “They say he had a fantastic job, prestige, and boatloads of money, but he got fired one day, and no one knows why. His wife divorced him when he couldn’t find other work, and he ended up sitting in the corner over there, talking to himself for hours on end, drinking his brew.”

Among the possibilities he listed was the idea that a woman might have led to David’s fall. I latched onto that possibility, because it bolstered Paul’s summation of the men in The Family Liquor Store. I was satisfied with the answer, but Paul and those who informed him, said it was more complicated than that. They wouldn’t let that too-smart angle go in regard to David Hauser’s condition. They declared that was the, “The nut of it all.”

Talking to yourself was a common practice of The Family Store patronage. Those who didn’t do so were the ones who stood out. The interesting and defining factor that separated David Hauser from the pack was that he not only talked to himself, he listened, and he appeared to be a good listener in those one-sided conversations, a characteristic that made him an anomaly in a world of anomalies. There were times when David looked to a speaker no one else could see, but he reserved those shared glances with the speaker for the introductory portion of the speaker’s conversation. When the purported speaker’s dialogue progressed, David Hauser’s gaze took a diagonal slant, and it morphed into an outward glance, followed by an inward one that suggested he was contemplating what the other was saying. At times, David Hauser and the purported speaker said nothing at all.

Prior to David Hauser, I assumed that everyone who spoke did so to fill a void. In a world of people with no listening skills, most intangible friends are excellent listeners. David Hauser filled that void, but he and his companion created other voids, what some might call seven-second lulls. At times, the lulls in those conversations ended with active-listening prompts on David’s part. This display suggested that the purported speaker ended the lull, and David’s listening prompts encouraged the speaker to continue. At other times, David stopped speaking abruptly, as if the purported speaker just interrupted him.

I was intrigued with David Hauser when he first sat down to discuss whatever he felt compelled to discuss with his imaginary friend, Paul’s description of the man’s fall fascinated me, but the more I watched the man and studied his progression, the more obsessed I became with him. I knew Paul would mock me for it, and I knew he could be brutal, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to know what this guy was saying.

“I have to know what he’s saying,” I told Paul.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Paul said. “Why?”

I thought of telling him that I thought it was funny, but I tried that in the past and Paul spotted the ruse for what it was. He knew I was always on the hunt for primary source information that I couldn’t learn from books. I went through a whole cavalcade of excuses in the brief pause between us, and I came out of that saying, “I don’t know,” which was about the most honest answer I could’ve said, because I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing, but I knew I had to do it. 

What I think I needed to know was if David Hauser needed to talk to an imaginary person to help him through this moment of devastating failure in his life, or if that moment led him to become mentally impaired “Like that!” as Paul described it. Did David Hauser speak to himself to sort through internal difficulties, as a form of therapy? Did he recognize how odd it seemed to us on some level, and he needed it so much that he didn’t care what we thought, or did he genuinely believed he was talking with someone else.

I didn’t know what I would see or hear to satisfy my questions, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t pursue this matter to a satisfactory conclusion. Is there a word that can inform another that a person genuinely believes another person is there? I wondered. Is there a word, or series of words, that will inform an observer that a person has manifested another person to satisfy their needs? The latter was so far beyond my comprehension that I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about it, but I figured David’s mannerisms, his tone, and the context of his active-listening prompts would form some sort of conclusion for me.

“Be careful,” Paul said after mocking me. Those two words slipped out as if he was repeating a warning he received when he considered investigating David Hauser further. To pound his warning home, Paul dropped some dramatic repetition on me, “Be careful.”

I thought of mocking him for being so cinematic, but I couldn’t shake the idea that Paul’s warning held some merit, and my curiosity in this matter might prove dangerous. “Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What if he says something so intellectual that it gets trapped in your brain and you go insane trying to figure it out?”

“Could that happen?”

“How does a guy go insane by being too smart?”

Paul could’ve been messing with me, and my obsession with David Hauser kept me from seeing it, but it was more likely that he believed it. We were both avid fans of the horror genre, and we were both irrational teenagers who still believed in various superstitions, black magic, curses, elements of dark art, and the supernatural. Our minds were just beginning to grasp the complex, inner workings of the adult, real world, but we were still young enough to believe that that there could be a reality occurring in our world that operated from an altogether different premise.

Long story short, Paul’s attempts to warn me, followed by his questions, did set me back, and I did try to avoid the subject of David Hauser for a spell. I was not what one would call an intellectual young man. My curiosity was insatiable, and I was an observant sort, but tackling highbrow intellectual theory or highbrow literature was beyond me. I was ill equipped for that, ill-equipped, naïve, and vulnerable to the idea that a thought, like a corruptible woman bent on destroying, could leave a man incapacitated to a point that they frequent a low-rent liquor store for the rest of their days speaking to non-existent people.

In the brief moment that followed Paul’s warning, I focused on this idea that David Hauser reached some sort of intellectual peak and went over it. What is an intellectual peak, I asked myself. It seemed like one of those foolish, theoretical questions we ask ourselves just to be provocative, but I found it fascinating, and as Paul said I had a real life example of it before me.  If there was an intellectual peak, I figured that I hadn’t even come close to mine at that point in my life, but I thought that I should work through the dynamics of it in the event that I ever brushed against that border. Will a person know when they’ve arrived at the border of an intellectual peak? I wondered. Is there a maximum capacity one should be wary of crossing? If they do cross it, do they risk injury, similar to athletes who push themselves beyond the limits of their physical ability? I thought of a pole-vaulter, sticking a pole in the ground, attempting a jump he should have reconsidered and the resultant physical injuries that could follow.

When I put those irrational fears aside, other irrational fears replaced those, as I walked over to David Hauser. Paul’s “Be careful” played in my head, along with the realization that prior to building the courage to step near David Hauser my fear of him was speculative in nature. It dawned on me that all I was doing was braving the fears of the unknown. I had no idea how I would deal with whatever reality lay ahead, but I braved those fears and began to cautiously approach David Hauser.

David Hauser’s volume lowered a bit, as I neared his sphere of influence. I considered that a coincidence and I progressed, pretending to look at something outside the window behind him. As I neared closer, his volume dropped even lower, until he stopped talking. I didn’t think that was a coincidence, but I wasn’t sure. I wondered if he was trying to prevent me from hearing what he was saying.

Whatever the case, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I was more than a little relieved. I felt brave for nearing him even though I was afraid. I was wary of getting too close, because I feared the idea of having one of his overwhelming theories implanted in my brain. I assumed such an implantation might be equivalent to an alien putting a finger on a human head and introducing thoughts so far beyond that brain’s capacity that it could cause the victim to start shaking and drooling, like what happened to that kid in The Shining. I considered it plausible that I could wake in a straitjacket with that theory rattling around in my head, searching for answers, until I ended up screaming for a nurse to come in and provide me some relief in the form of unhealthy doses of chlorpromazine to release the pressure in my head.

I later learned that David Hauser achieved an advanced degree in some subject, earned from some Northeastern Ivy League school. I never found out if that was a fact or not, but if it was, it placed him so far above those trapped in this incarnation of hell, known as The Family Liquor Store, that I figured everyone involved needed a way to deal with his story, and everyone loved the story.

I wasn’t there when David Hauser told the story of what happened to him, so I don’t have primary source information I wanted regarding his fall from grace, but the secondhand stories of how this once prominent man, of such unimaginable abilities, fell to a level of despair and failure was on the tip of the tongue of everyone that heard it. “Like that!” they said, with a snap of their fingers to punctuate the description. Bubbling beneath that surface fascination were unspoken fears, confusion, and concern that if it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us. David was also our symbol for impairment, and the idea that the luxury of physical and mental health frees us up to achieve the luxury of individuality. This isn’t to say that impaired individuals can’t achieve individuality, but that they’re more distracted by trying to maintain health. We don’t appreciate this luxury as much as we fear the possibilities of the opposite. In doing so, we search for answers. No one knew who came up with our answer first, and no one questioned if that person knew what they were talking about when they dropped their prognosis, but no one truly cared whether it was a fact or not. We just needed an answer, or some way to cope with the enormity of it all.

My guess was that even if we could’ve convinced David Hauser to sit down, in a clinical setting, or create some sort of climate that would assure him that no one would use his answers to satisfy some sort of perverse curiosity, we still wouldn’t get any answers out of him, because he probably didn’t have any.

The man who spent most of his life answering the most difficult questions any of us could imagine, hit a block, a wall, or some obstacle that prevented him from finding the answer that could prove beneficial to his continued existence. His solution, therefore, was to talk it out with a certain, special no one for answers.

That led me to wonder if that had anything to do with David Hauser lowering his voice and silencing as I neared him. If David Hauser’s mind was once as strong and complex as those in The Family Liquor Store suggested, and he had one question stuck on repeat in his head, to the point of needing to manifest another presence to help him work through it, how embarrassing would it be for such a man to have an eavesdropping teenager, who knew so little about the world, find that answer for him? 

I had an answer for what happened to David Hauser, we all did, but I’m quite sure our answer didn’t come anywhere close to solving the actual question of how a man could fall so far. I’m quite sure it was nothing more than a comfortable alternative developed by us, for us, to try to resolve the complexities of such an complicated and intricate question that could’ve driven us insane “Like that!” if we tried to figure it out and it trapped itself in our brain.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might enjoy the other members of the seven strong:

The Thief’s Mentality

He Used to Have a Mohawk

That’s Me In the Corner

You Don’t Bring me Flowers Anymore!

… And Then There’s Todd

When Geese Attack!

How to Succeed in Writing III: Are you Intelligent Enough to Write a Novel?

Rilaly3 Comments

“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 writing great fiction is streamlining your story. Cut the fat! Some of the greatest authors of all time have admitted 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 quite 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.

There are asides, and then there are asides. Some asides are what we enjoy in a novel. Some provide setting, pace, and drama. Some also build suspense by taking us away from the train barreling down on the main character to form a cliff hanger. Some fortify the characteristics of a character, and kill a 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 want involvement. Readers don’t fall in love with snapshot stories. They want a world. They not only want to know the humans that they are reading about, they want to be involved with them. 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 these characters take from place to place. They want to know these people, so when something happens to them, they can care about them. 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 taken off pace, and they don’t want to read a self-absorbed writer who thinks it’s all about them. Cut the fat! Get to the point already!

“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.

One such aside involved the author trying to prove how intelligent they are. The desire to be perceived as intelligent 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 say 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 prove to the world that I was one smart cookie. I also wanted to show that half of the world that disagreed with my politics how wrong they were. So, I put my main character through an incident, and he came out of it enlightened by a political philosophy that agreed with mine. 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, if Stephen King can get away with telling us about tired rockers that we’ve all heard a thousand times. Why can’t I tell a few readers about a group they’ve never heard before?” Copy the masters right? I wanted the world to know both sides of my brain in the same artistic piece. After taking a step back, I reread the novel, and 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 decent stories, I was going to have to divide my desires up. I was going to have to cut the fat. I was going to have to discipline myself to the creed that should be recited nightly by all aspiring storytellers: Story is sacred. I was going to have to learn to channel my desire to be perceived as smart into political and philosophical blogs. I was going to have to channel my desires to have people listen to my “discovered” music into Amazon.com reviews, and my stories, my novels, and my short stories would be left pure, untarnished stories with no agendas. By dividing these desires up, I would be 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 tried to teach the world when they sang: “You gotta keep ‘em separated.”

There’s one writer, he-who-must-not-be-named, who never learned this principle. This author presumably got tired of being viewed as nothing more than 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 master 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.

thomas-mannBut 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 who doesn’t know the difference, and you don’t think your politics is politics, you should probably be writing something political. If you’re one of those who wants to write politics into your novel simply because it makes for such great filler, however, then you should try to avoid the self-indulgent conceit that ticks off that half of the population that disagrees with your 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 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 to know your punctuation and grammar rules, you will need to know when and where to make paragraph breaks, and you will need to know how to edit your story for pace, 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 author 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 clever 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 strongly encourage you to do so, but you cannot learn the art of storytelling. This ability to tell a story is, largely, a gift. Either you have it or you don’t.”

Be brilliant first, in other words, and if you can achieve brilliance, you can learn the rest. You can gain the intelligence necessary to get a thumbs up from a publisher, an agent, and eventually a reader, but you cannot learn 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 Wildeplateau, you can then attend to the self-indulgent effort of proving your intelligence. I don’t understand why that is so important to those who achieve artistic brilliance, but if I could understand their mindset better, I would probably be one of them. 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 once said, “You might as well be yourself, everyone else is taken.”