Today’s fact is that Just as perfection can be the enemy of the good, hyperintelligent writing can cripple the storytelling approach of good fiction.

You’re doomed if you think too much. My father had a girlfriend at one time — Polish, very nice, not too bright up there, if you know what I mean, big Danielle Steel fan and former waitress — and she said, Greg, you think too much.

*wiping sweat off my brow in a rapidfire motion* Man! That’s a relief that you noticed and corrected me! I think too much. Wow. Just like, wow. You are one deep Polish person, Ellie. Has anyone ever told you that? And I thought thinking was a precursor to dominant success in life, planning, sketching out dreams, making intellectual maps to get from A to C to Z… wow. Let’s pick up a Danielle Steel novel instead and get lost in books with titles like The Klone and I. Just like you like.

But you know, Danielle Steel had it right and in a way, so too did Polish Ellie. Hyperintelligent writing is a risky thing to try and pull off. If you make it work, you can thrill the reader by making him feel like he’s 25 IQ points smarter than he actually is. But if you fail… it’s a long drop down.

You lose momentum when you confuse the reader. More than that, if it’s really bad, it’ll function as a brick wall he rams his ramjet-flying head into.

It’s smart to play it dumb as often as you can in your writing. Short, snappy sentences. Basic word-choice. The dog jumped up on its hind legs and barked. He gasped. She smiled, thinking it was going to be a beautiful day. Like that. But you have to intersperse these idiot-Vibes with more wordy, thinky fare to keep the salad nice and crisp. He grinned as if he’d just been told the secret of the universe and it wasn’t 42. The school play had all the taste and consistency of soggy porridge served to inmates. And sometimes even a killer long run-on-sentence type of line: The blog was so damn good that the readers forgot time, forgot who they were — and most of all, forgot the need to go to the bathroom until they were pissing themselves in laughter at something funny Greg Nikolic had written. (Oh, I forgot, a bastard like me isn’t allowed to be funny.)

Hyperintelligent writing is two steps beyond the last, most convoluted example I gave you. It’s linked together and crammed jam-on-peanut-butter-with-Bermuda-onions, a taste that only a rarebreed hedonist could love.

Are you a rarebreed hedonist? Are most of the people you know? No? Then be very, very careful about when you bring out your hyperintelligent writing. Treat it like a big cannon in the siege of an ancient city that’s struggling to stay afloat. If you’re winning the war, why test it out? It might blow up in your face. But if you want to make a splash, and knock down a whole wall with one go, it might be worth a try.

Maybe.

If you know exactly what you’re doing and if it’s rare. The streak of hyperintelligences strung together in a row like pearls in a necklace is what we call literature, and we aren’t doing that, we’re doing commercial fiction. Why are we doing that? Because it pays better, dummy.

Even Ellie knew that.