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!

When I was a young man, I wrote exclusively on an old 1950s-era manual typewriter that I stole from my Mom (in the sense that it was her typewriter from her working days, and I borrowed it one day and simply never gave it back). I loved pounding out stories on that thing. It was like a tank, a solid hunk of metal and you could feel the goddamn earth shake every time I typed on it.

At the same time, I started writing short stories in college-ruled notebooks, something I still do today, and I got superstitious about the pens I used. I would only use a certain kind of cheap blue disposable pen, so I bought them by the dozen and if one ran out of ink I stopped working until I could find a replacement.

In other words, I totally fetishized my implements. Until practicality imposed itself.

Any Way, Any Where

Basically, the Internet happened and I could no longer get away with submitting type-written manuscripts, and finding my exact kind of pen became a bit of a burden. So I weaned myself off the typewriter (I tried to do first drafts on it, keyboarding them in for revision, but this was too much work when I could simply do the first draft on a computer) and I got a little looser with my pen rules (though they still must be blue for no reason I can articulate).

Oddly, despite these early fetishes, I’ve never been hung up on office space or writing space, and ultimately I think that’s the healthiest thing: Don’t get hung up on where or how you write.

For some writers I know, these hang ups are delaying tactics. They spend months futzing with their writing nook, or playing with fonts, or trying out keyboards, all in the service of avoiding having to actually start their book and possibly fail at it. For others, it’s just a love of the idea of being a writer but not so much the effort involved.

But the perfect writing space, or a super-cool process involving expensive pens or expensive gadgets, shouldn’t be your focus. There’s nothing wrong with having a great working space where you’re comfy and free from distraction. There’s nothing wrong with liking a certain pen, or a certain keyboard, or a certain word processing software. But I’ve come to believe that the main goal should be productivity: Learn to write under any conditions, any where, in any way. Learn to be able to composed a short story using a stubby SAT pencil and some butcher paper while trapped in an elevator with fifteen other people. If you can do that, you’ll always produce great stuff, no matter what’s going on in your life. The more fragile and rigid your environment, implements, and process is, the more likely it gets broken on a regular basis. And every day you don’t write because you ran out of the right pens is a day you’ve lost.

Of course, none of this applies to whiskey. When the house runs dry of spirits nothing gets done, but that’s just science.

Writing a story (or even a work of non-fiction) involves a lot of moving parts—imagination, rational thought, language skills, literary sense, style, et al. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, though—sometimes you get so caught up in trying to capture voice or describe action that you forget to pay attention to some of the most basic, dumbest things that can make your writing suck.

Writing a story, for example, is as much about the placement of words on the page as it is the ideas that those words convey. This is one reason writer’s have experimented with the form of their sentences as much as they’ve experimented with the content.

Writing a story is therefore more than just a mental act. It’s a physical one, with a physical record that can affect how your reader interprets or reacts to a story. For example: Stacked paragraphs.

Writing a Story

Look at the first three paragraphs of this little essay; they all being with the same three words. This is a bit of an extreme example of Stacked Paragraphs; for me it usually manifests in a more subtle way—like starting every paragraph with He. “He looked. He stood up. He sighed.” That sort of thing. Very often I’ll pause in the middle of writing a story and realize I’ve started the last six paragraphs with the word He, forming a stack that jumps out at you once you see it on the page or screen.

This can be bad because it becomes a drone in the reader’s mind, a repeated rhythm and beat that—unless it’s on purpose for a specific reason—makes your writing seem dull. When the reader subconsciously anticipates how every paragraph begins, they start getting lazy about reading your work—and then they get bored.

Stacked paragraphs is a minor thing you can fix easily enough in revision—but to do so you first have to be aware of it. Keep your eyes open.

And when fixing it, resist the urge to drop all kinds of bizarre new ways saying He did something. Getting rid of stacked paragraphs with awkward constructions or oddball word replacements might liven up your writing, but it leads you into a whole new minefield.

And whatever you do, don’t think about all the dumb mechanics mistakes you’re making that you haven’t noticed yet. Believe me, that way lies madness.

There’s a human tendency to stratify just about every pursuit between amateurs and professionals. In some cases, of course, this is useful; it’s good to know the person you just hired to re-wire your house is a licensed, professional electrician and not someone who is fascinated by the way electricity causes fires, for example. And if someone offers to buy you some drinks, it’s helpful to know they’re not going to punk out after ten or eleven rounds.

This drive towards professionalism is sometimes harmful, though, and is sometimes used merely to create an exclusive strata so those on the right side of the velvet rope can feel smug. Creating jargon and secret information that only the initiated can parse is one way of doing this; jargon can be an incredibly useful shorthand for professionals, of course, conveying reams of information in a condensed form almost like the episode Darmok from Star Trek: The Next Generation where an alien civilization uses short phrases that convey entire scenarios with incredible depth of meaning.

But professionalism isn’t always useful. Sometimes it’s just flattering yourself. That’s how it is in writing.

Jargon for the Loss

Some young writers strive for the secret knowledge that professionalism can provide because it makes them feel like they’ve slipped past the velvet rope even if they haven’t written anything worth reading or published anything. And that’s the real danger here; being able to discuss The Hero’s Journey in depth, or explaining to anyone who will listen that the ?climax’ isn’t the end of the story is great and all, but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not actually writing.

In other words, don’t waste too much energy on being able to talk a good writing game. Instead, put that energy into the actual writing. No one’s gonna care if you call the denouement of your novel That Moment When It All You Know Kind of Gets Ironed Out and Everyone is Done Fighting—if your story is great. If your story is great, you can call the plot mechanics by any names you want, and literally no one will care.

Sure, knowing the jargon and concepts will help you discuss writing with your fellow novelists, but trust me when I say that this is overrated. Also overrated? Ending blog posts with a coherent restatement of your premise.