How Not To Write Great Literature
Cao Xueqin breaks the rules (again)
How Not To Write Great Literature
Substack is filled with advice on writing.
The reason isn’t that hard to understand. Most people on Substack are prospective writers, not interested readers.
This is especially true on Substack Notes, the social media platform affixed to the service. The notes that tend to do the best are the ones that talk about the process of writing, or the pains involved with writing. You can get a lot further on this platform by sending out empty platitudes three times a day via Notes than you can spending time working on your craft.
So, in the spirit of the platform, I’ll give you the opposite. Here is a guide on how to not write great literature, one created in the style of Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber.
Don’t Introduce Your Main Characters Right Away
Normal books tell us who is important right off the bat.
That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? The main characters should be among the first characters we meet.
That doesn’t happen in Dream of the Red Chamber. Instead, we have a long and somewhat rambling prologue, including a bunch of cryptic stuff happening in heaven with stones and flowers and the like:
The first character we meet, Zhen Shiyin, is absent for most of the book:
In fact, we don’t meet the two main characters — Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu — until the third chapter:
Don’t Begin With Any Action
Action? That’s for suckers. Instead, why not begin your book with a famous philosophic rant that is mostly incomprehensible?
Once you finish your rant, you can write some crazy stuff about a goddess and stones and all that jazz.
Spoil The Ending
We’re in the middle of this part right now. Cao Xueqin thought it would be nice to give us a chapter filled with cryptic predictive poems.
Figure out the poems, and you know what happens to every character. It’s like a cheat code in a video game!
Pass Away Before You Finish The Book
This is the best part.
Instead of writing a full draft somewhere, have a bunch of loose notes that get copied and passed around while you are alive.
Then, when you pass away, scholars and authors can fight over how your book was supposed to end and what the true meaning of it all is!
Why This Book Is Like This
The truth is that Cao Xueqin wrote Dream of the Red Chamber to be subversive. And I believe he did this on purpose.
He’s not a poor writer at all. In fact, the mere fact that his book is recognized as such a masterpiece despite defying the conventions of fiction is evidence of his brilliance.
Naturally, he couldn’t control when he passed away. However, I do wonder if he deliberately kept things a little bit messy and out of order just in case something happened to him.
But don’t try this at home, kids.
Great advice…I think. 😊