A Novel is Not a Story

April 19, 2026

Although I am a novelist, I wouldn't call myself a storyteller. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I don’t like stories. I don’t get excited when someone decides to tell me a story, and I find the most boring parts of novels to be when things are happening. It’s rare that my favourite books have much of a plot at all, aside from the initial premise that sets up the characters and their world.

To my mind, the novel is not a dramatic medium. I don’t get a thrill out of intrigue and suspense. The novel is an introspective medium, or, in rare cases, an extrospective medium. By which I mean that a novel does not tell a story but instead explores a subject. That subject is often a person, but it can also be an idea — in fact, most of the time when the subject is a person, that person is being used to explore an idea. However, I feel uncomfortable saying only that “novels explore an idea,” because it’s quite important that a person is involved. For example, Moby-Dick clearly explores an idea, or collection of ideas, but those ideas would not be as meaningful if it weren’t for the person of Ishmael (and later, Ahab.) In Search of Lost Time explores the concept of memory, but it does so via the life of Marcel Proust (or whoever you consider the narrator to be), which is what lends it its particular quality. It would not be as effective of a novel if it explored the life of any other person.

There are then of course examples where it takes multiple people to get at the idea: Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Dostoevsky’s Demons, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to name a few. This is much more difficult to pull off, because we need to prevent the reader from getting lost in a crowd of people and events. Events are dangerous, because events cause change — if too much changes too fast, we lose our grasp on the characters. (I consider this to be the failing of my second, as yet unpublished, novel, though I will leave you to one day make up your own mind about that.) In the best novels, events serve to place characters into situations — then, we sit in these situations with them. We watch the character and the situation interact; through this interaction, we are introduced to the idea.

At the best of times, the character sits and dwells on their situation. This is the wonder of the Gothic novel, when it’s done right: the material horrors of Frankenstein pale in comparison to the horror that exists within Dr. Frankenstein’s mind. To tell us what the Creature does is mere storytelling, but the emotional core of the novel is the distracted mental state of the characters. Melmoth the Wanderer, another epitome of the genre, has a plot that borders on the nonsensical, constructing a baffling framework of stories-within-stories, but the novel excels because we spend over a hundred pages with a man whose been forced into monkhood, as he struggles against the incompatible confines of a convent. His horror, his despair, his guilt, his shame, his defiance, his anger, his indignation — we live in it. That’s what literature is all about.

All this is perhaps why I find myself so comfortable writing non-fiction. To my mind, the only reason to tell a story is to try to explain something. When I share anecdotes or particulars about my life, the goal is to explain who I am. I don’t just share them for fun, or because they’re interesting in themselves. In fact, I wouldn’t consider them interesting at all outside of the context of explaining the essence of my existence. This is where a lot of memoir writing fails for me — it struggles to have a point. The worst case is when the writer becomes confused about the point, and feels that each anecdote needs to have some sort of moral, or some universal message about humanity or society at large. Humanity and society at large is just a collection of individual feeling beings; we can only understand it by understanding one person at a time. Each memoir can only pertain to a single person. People will relate more or less depending on their experiences and disposition, but they relate to a person, not to a generalized experience. This is why we write, “My Dog Died,” and not, “People’s Dogs Die.”

On the other side of the coin, you can’t assume that an important aspect of your life is important to other people just because it’s important to you. It has to be interesting. This where literary flair comes in. Literature is entertaining. It is entertaining by virtue of words having sounds and meanings. Very rarely is a story interesting by virtue of the events themselves — and even if it is, the best response we can hope for is, “Oh, that’s interesting.” That’s how I feel when someone tells me something happened: “Huh, that’s weird that that happened.” Let me tell you: if all I had to keep me going in this life was “that’s weird that that happened,” I would have driven a rocket-ship straight into the fiery clouds of Jupiter by now.

I will admit to being something of an anomaly. You very rarely hear people say, “I got bored because there was too much stuff happening.” For many, there is no greater thrill than for something to be happening. But I am like this in life, too — my favourite times are when nothing is going on at all. I’ve said before: “it is my fate not to live life, but to read about it in books.” The strange thing is that I also write about it in books. And so the question is, what exactly am I writing about? Of course, life has more or less happened to me over the last thirty years, but not in any great amount. I’ve lived less of my life than I’ve chosen not to live, if that makes any sense.

When I wrote a brief biography several months ago, I included reading The World as Will and Representation and In Search of Lost Time. In truth, I could’ve included a lot more books than just those. I could’ve written the whole biography out of books: a bibliobiography. To my mind, any author worth their salt has more of a bibliobiography than anything else. Sure, Herman Melville sailed the seas, but is not the most important part of his literary life when he sat down and gorged himself on the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Carlyle, etc? Natsume Soseki is known for being one of the first Japanese students to study in England, but he readily admits to doing nothing in that foreign land but sit alone in his bedroom and read piles of books.

The part of life not spent reading is often spent wandering the confines of their own mind; an author’s life is often not characterized by events but reactions to events, by the emotional states accompanying such events, and by the sharp memory of particular torments and joys. They recount not what happened, but an expansive and precise account of exactly how such an event is experienced. How does one develop such an account? By reliving moments over and over in one’s memory — by dwelling and moping and fussing over every little detail. One with such a temperament lives even a relatively mundane life a thousand times over, imbuing it with a meaning and significance that, from any dispassionate point of view, simply isn’t there.

In the grand scheme of everything, what has happened to me over the course of my brief life matters very little. But it matters a whole lot to me, and for whatever sick and twisted reason, I feel it to be imperative that I make it matter to you too, to exactly the same degree. This is, of course, impossible, but it often feels imperative to do impossible things — in fact, the most necessary actions in life are impossible: human communication, sharing our inner selves with one another, empathizing — in short, love. Love is that grand impossible thing that prompts us all to reach out with trembling hands, rarely getting what we want or deserve or even understand, rarely giving what we desire or mean or even understand, but trying ceaselessly nonetheless.

Love is all in the mind — it has no material presence. It is not to be found in the things that happen in this world — in chemical reactions, atomic reconfigurations, organic metamorphoses — but only in our experience, buried deep, deep in the gloom where even the vision of our mind’s eye grows dim and blurry, and only the bewildering and inscrutable powers of art can give us any hope.