Your Novel Doesn’t Need to Be Clever

When I wrote my second novel, Grace at Spirit Lake, I thought I needed to be clever. I thought part of writing a good novel meant finding some unusual, artful way to tell the story—something that would make the book feel more literary, more sophisticated, and more worthy of attention. Instead of trusting the story itself, I looked for devices that might make the storytelling feel elevated (Don’t ask me about Purple Prose, I learned my lesson the hard way). I wanted uncertainty. I wanted ambiguity. I wanted the reader to feel slightly off-balance in a way that I mistook for intrigue.

One of the choices I made was to include a series of letters written by a soldier who was part of a volunteer militia that traveled through severe winter conditions in pursuit of Inkpaduta, the Dakota leader accused of leading the attacks at Spirit and Okoboji Lakes. The historical framework behind that storyline was real. There was an attack, there was an expedition, and the winter conditions were indeed harsh. But the letters themselves were completely fictionalized. Looking back, they were not especially plausible, and that problem was compounded by the fact that I never made it sufficiently clear who these people were. The identity of the letter writer was vague, the recipient was vague, and the relationship of both characters to the main narrative was more obscured than illuminated.

At the time, I thought I was being clever. I thought I was revealing information slowly and strategically, creating a kind of mystery that would make the story feel richer. What I understand now is that I was not creating mystery so much as confusion. More than a decade later, after earning an MFA in creative writing and spending years working as a professional editor and publisher, I can see how misguided that instinct was. I had mistaken obscurity for sophistication, vagueness for depth, and structural complication for literary merit.

That does not mean clever writing has no value. It certainly can. A unique voice matters. Formal risk can matters and experimentation has its place. There are novels that break rules beautifully and structures that create extraordinary effects. Think Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. But if you are writing your first manuscript, or even your second, I think the temptation to be different can lead you away from the very thing that matters most: telling a story clearly enough that readers can fully enter it. For newer writers in particular, cleverness is often less useful than clarity, and novelty is often less important than control.

This can feel counterintuitive because writers are constantly reminded that they need to stand out. There are more manuscripts than most agents or editors could ever possibly read. There are more books than any reader could ever hope to finish. In that environment, it is easy to assume that your primary task is to distinguish yourself by doing something unusual. But I do not think that is how most writers actually distinguish themselves. More often, they do so through the intensity of their subject matter, the sincerity of their interests, the emotional force of their storytelling, and the depth of their commitment to the story they are trying to tell.

Storytelling has patterns because those patterns work. Readers want to understand who matters, what those people want, what is standing in their way, and why it matters. They want a narrative that builds pressure, deepens conflict, and delivers an ending that feels earned. They want to trust the story and trust is not created by making the reading experience more difficult than it needs to be. It is created by orienting the reader well enough that they can give their full attention not to figuring out the mechanics of the book, but to feeling its movement and meaning.

That is why trying to be clever too early can be so damaging. It does not merely risk confusing the reader. It also makes the writer’s job harder at every stage. It makes the drafting harder because you are not just trying to tell a story; you are trying to manage the performance of your cleverness at the same time. It makes revision harder because you now have to sort through not only whether the emotional arc works, but whether the architecture of the story is even legible. It makes critique harder because readers may know that something feels off without being able to identify whether the problem lies in structure, pacing, characterization, or point of view. And it can make publication harder too, because a confusing story is much more difficult to champion, revise, or recommend.