Writing a Novel: Rationality is for Losers

Writing a novel is hard. And I don’t mean going to the gym twice a week hard, I mean building a house in your spare time for fun hard because that will take about the same amount of time if you know what you’re doing. Except that when you’re done, you can live in your homemade house and there is a good market for it. Someone will buy it from you or you can rent it out. None of that is true of the novel. Yet I would urge you, if it’s your desire, to throw away logic and your weekends and write that novel because rationality is for losers.

Now I’m not bashing the person who spends his weekends building a home for his family or rebuilding a car with his son. If those are your passions, then you should do that. What I’m saying is that for someone drawn to creativity, the only reasonable thing to do is to be irrational and throw your life’s effort into something that by all rational expectations won’t work.

Search the market and find out what is hot. Write the book that readers want if you hope to have any success. A perfectly rational statement. The irrational choice is to write the book you’re desperate to write because it isn’t out there. To throw your vision onto the page, no matter whether anyone else cares to see it or not. And once again rationality is for losers. Would you rather read a book that was carefully and meticulously crafted to be just like the most popular books that came out last year, or would you like to read something that the author created because she had a drive to make something fresh?

Most authors won’t be rich, in fact most published authors have a job. It’s a true and rational statement. But rationality is for losers. Belief is vital. You’ll never succeed as a writer if you don’t believe that your novel will rise above all the others. The rational belief may be that you will write a book that won’t stand out from the crowd. But that rational belief is a terrible choice. No one will pour all their spare time into a book they believe to be mediocre, and no one will enjoy a book that wasn’t written with the passionate enthusiasm of someone who believes they are creating a work of art.

The path of the artist is an irrational path. Every statistic in the world shows that you’d make more money getting an engineering or business degree. Computer programming is kind of creative, right? It’s all true. That teaching degree you got will almost certainly guarantee that you have a job, and a fulfilling and important job working to improve the lives of young people. But if you’re doing it because it’s safe instead of because it’s what you want to do, then rationality is for losers. Throw yourself head first off that cliff and figure out the next part on the way down. You have permission to be irrational. To ignore all the well-meaning people who want you to be safe instead of happy. Because if the only way you can be satisfied is to be irrational, then rationality is for losers.