I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy. Blame my parents, who always treated me like a smart guy. Blame my teachers, who also acted like I was smart. And I did pretty good in school, for a while—until one day I realized that my older brother was actually smarter, and always did better than I did. So I gave up and began exploring ways to get through school without, you know, studying or doing any work.
Still, as my wife The Duchess will attest, secretly I still think of myself as Very Smart and sometimes I can’t resist trying to show off how smart I am. The fact that these showoff moments usually end in humiliation and embarrassment somehow doesn’t deter me from thinking that I’m Very Smart.
That’s okay; my humiliation and embarrassment is entertaining and thus enriches the world. The only time trying to show off becomes a problem for a writer is when you do it in your fiction.
The Answer is Don’t Think About It
Showing off in your writing happens in three basic ways:
1. Research Gore: You spent a hecka lot of time researching something for your book, and goddammmit you’re going to get your dollar’s worth by dropping every. single. bit. of that research into your story, no matter how awkward it makes things.
2. See-What-I-Did There-ism: You’ve spun up one of those perfect plots, filled with surprises and twists and subtleties, but you can’t just let it speak for itself—you have to put a pin on every brilliant thing, having characters break into speeches explaining the trick, or returning to it over and over again to ogle this or that piece of smartness.
3. Encyclopedia Browning: You know a lot of things. You know a lot of interesting things, and like the Worst Guest at a Party Ever you must tell everyone all of your interesting things. So you have your characters speak like Wikipedia Articles, droning on and on about stuff that has nothing to do with the plot in order to drop all these awesome tidbits into the story.
These are all terrible for your story. Dropping interesting stuff into your fiction in natural, smooth ways can be great. Dropping things like anvils into the middle of your story or dialogue is annoying, because it’s like when you have a conversation about something and the other person keeps steering it back to themselves.
You might very well be as smart, well-read, and traveled as you think you are. Just keep reminding yourself that no one is reading your book because you’re interesting. They’re there for the story.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go read the dictionary for a while so I can drop some 50-cent words into my next book. Abra-Adumbrate!