Methodposting #1: Good novels use MSG

(this is first in like 3 rants i wrote last year in the depth of the hell that is writing my novel)

Writing fiction is very cool because you get to be less naked. You get away with basically nothing in poetry or criticism. You are completely naked, beholden to your subject, beholden to your questions. In poetry you are beholden to sound. In noncritical nonfiction you sometimes have to use gimmicks by necessity and it's like, totally fine, nobody calls you out for it, it usually makes the article-essay-whatever it is a lot better for the reader. But writing fiction is about developing a new relationship to language and because you are doing that sometimes you can be a little bad. Good fiction often has bad parts that make it good. Sometimes the bad parts are the good parts.

I really don't know why people still write novels because I think, on a high level, there is very few interesting things you can do nowadays. I remember reading somewhere that David Mitchell (who I don't respect) once said he thought that form is the last bastion of experimentation in the novel. Not true, but I think he's onto something. I just think that telling a good story or showcasing a narrative is really such a weak reason to write fiction. The modern technologies of narrative are often better suited to storytelling than the novel form. Writers are often not very good storytellers.

What I'm trying to say is that it does not take so much life or so much reading to realize that if you're going to write fiction then you better be doing something new with language. Plotting well is not enough. Telling a fun story is not enough. Writing for an audience, to service an urge, all of that is not enough. Nobody reads novels because honestly? There's other ways to get the 'hit' of listening to a story, and you have to live with that. If you're still writing fiction today you must believe really stubbornly that there is something new you can do with language and form. I believe that, hence why I'm writing this novel, because there is one very specific thing I wanted to do with language that I think no one has done before, and I think it is working. But you have to deliver it correctly. As an author, especially an unpublished hack like myself, it's my job to snowbunny mind control the reader.

I think writing good fiction is like cooking Chinese food. You can make something that's completely new and mindblowing but at the end of the day you have to add a little MSG, because MSG just unfortunately makes everything taste a bit better. You work in a fucking restaurant and people go crazy for MSG. And when you serve it some people will taste the spices, some people will taste the ingredients, some people will taste the MSG. Your job, as a chef, is not as simple as capitulating to the tastes of your audience; your job is to make sure people keep coming to your restaurant so you don't lose your job, by whatever means necessary. To get good at writing is very hard but theoretically simple. You find what you want to cook, and you learn how to add the MSG. The MSG is not what makes a book special, it's what makes a book competent. And it's different for different authors, different genres, different epochs. It's the stuff you add to make a book good and exciting so it can have a shot at being great and profound.

I grew up reading contemp Anglophone novels featuring increasingly socially complex settings and increasingly psychologically complex characters in increasingly convoluted situations that are lightly plotted and feature really heavy interiority, beautiful prose. These novels are good, but I couldn't stand them, even though I can identify that they're good at craft and trying to show something new or say something new (which, mind you, is different from trying to do something new. Ideally you want to be doing all three. Show, say, do.)

Over time I realized that my gripe against these books is the same gripe I have against certain foods: sometimes an author accidentally writes an underseasoned novel. Forgot to add MSG, refused to add MSG, whatever the reason was, the underseasoned novel can be new and important and experimental but it can't be a Good Novel. The underseasoned novel does not feel like a necessity. The underseasoned novel is not a living animal. Literally no writer in the history of the world has ever gotten away with not using MSG and you're not about to be the first. You have to give your reader something to work with. You have to delight in your shackles, so to speak.

It's very tempting, when you are a young writer, to look down on authors who've built entire careers by writing books with a lot of MSG. It's especially tempting when you've learned to discern the taste of MSG in a dish and you personally has become a person who goes to restaurants and tells the chef to not add MSG because you feel like it's bad for you or something. When you feel these things it is important to remember that they are not taking the easy road. On the contrary, they've done the hard work of learning how to cook effectively with MSG, something that you presumbaly don't know how to do. You can learn. It's not hard. The hard part is biting the bullet and acknowledge that you can learn a thing or two from crowd-pleasing slop.

If you integrate MSG poorly, it can work against you. For genre fiction, this failure always manifests in poorly integrated research, like sci-fi novels that invoke stuff like "the discomlabubumeter with quantum field vision," like historical novels that have really genuine settings but characters with suspiciously modern feelings and beliefs. For many male writers, the MSG is a naked woman, which is why in so many great works of literature you come across r/menwritingwomen and you go "alright buddy" and move on. When learning how to use MSG effectively, you have to realize that there's an enormous amount of work you have to do to make something that seems naturally exciting to you, exciting to other people. You have no idea what your reader's relationship to language is, you have no idea who you reader is. Before you can do anything with your novel you have to use everything in your power, MSG and everything else, to teach the reader how to read you. A great novel teaches the reader how to read itself.

Perhaps all of this is cope because I am terrified by how simple and cliche the premise of my novel is. I stand by the formal parts, I stand by my craft, I stand by the plotting of the central mystery and the Russian doll structure, but at the end of the day, it’s literally just Finding Nemo. I’ve done all this work just to novelize Finding Nemo. Now the question is, did I put in MSG. I think so. I think the MSG is Finding Nemo.