Matt Haig

A while ago, on the Booktrust website, I wrote a blog about book snobs. It was quite popular and – not being a snob – I like popularity, but I also got into a lot of arguments online with book snobs who said that I was on the wrong side, because books were getting dumber. So, here’s an updated version, just for them.

1. Snobbery makes people worry about what they read. And people who worry about something stop enjoying it.

2. Snobbery leads to worse books. It plays to the idea that most people are dumb and want dumb books, and that only certain (posh/educated/cool) people like good books.

3. If something is popular it can still be good. Just ask Shakespeare. Or the Beatles. Or peanut butter.

4. Teenagers have more active brain cells than adults. And more fun. (Don’t knock YA.)

5. Being on Radio Four or being in The New York Times does not automatically make something better. It just means that it probably isn’t about zombies.

6. The book is very often not better than the film. (Jaws. The Godfather. But okay snobs, we’ll give you Alice in Wonderland.)

7. Wonder is universal. There isn’t a human in the world who wouldn’t enter the Sistine Chapel and not want to look up. Does that make Michelangelo a low-brow populist?

8. E-books, like paper books, are as good as the words they contain.

9. Snobbery pretends to be about books but really it is about people. It is about people trying to feel better than other people by belittling their taste.

10. To dismiss a book because of its type, not its content, is book racism.

11. Snobbery is about class. Virginia Woolf, the patron saint of book snobs, illustrated this when she was snobby about Ulysses. She called it an ‘illiterate underbred book’ written by a ‘self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are’.

12. You are one of 7,000,000,000 people in the world. You can never be above all of them. But you can be happy to belong.

13. The only people who fear people understanding what they are saying are people who have nothing really to say.

14. Books are not better for being misunderstood, any more than a building is better for having no door.

15. Shakespeare didn’t go to university, and spelt his name six different ways. He also told jokes. (Bad ones, true, but you can’t knock him for trying.)

16. Plot is not a dirty word. Plot is beautiful. Plot is the old criminal finding redemption. Plot is the quest to victory, or to love. Plot is the desire for action that is symptomatic of thinking and moving and being alive.

17. Book bloggers are not killing literary criticism. They are kneeling over its body, giving it CPR.

18. There can be as much beauty in short (words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters) as long. Sparrows fly higher than peacocks.

19. Book prizes are the result of six people getting in a room and compromising.

20. The book I am least proud of, that I didn’t work hard enough on, was my most ostentatiously highbrow one. The one the New York Times liked.

21. Reading a certain book doesn’t make you more intelligent any more than drinking absinthe makes you Van Gogh. It’s how you read, as much as what you read.

22. Never make someone feel bad for not having read or not read something. Books are there to heal, not hurt.

23. Don’t be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.

24. Just because something is a detective story doesn’t mean it was written for cynical reasons. It might mean the writer likes detective stories.

25. Simplicity is harder work than complexity. That is why editors exist.

26. Amazon is evil. Yeah, okay, we get it. But don’t be snobby about people using Amazon if you use a supermarket. Only if you actually live in the Amazon. Then it is allowed.

27. Don’t go on about the smell of books. It is like going on about the sound of chocolate.

28. If you worry about the ‘type’ of book you are writing, or the ‘type’ of person who will read it, you won’t be freeing your imagination, you’ll be trapping it in a VIP room where nothing is happening.

29. For me, personally, the point of writing is to connect me to this world, to my fellow humans. We are all miles apart. We have no real means of connecting except via language. And the deepest form of language is storytelling.

30. The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can’t reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book.

People think that if you are a writer giving writing tips  then you are annoying and probably getting too big for your writer boots. I know this because of all the letters I get saying ‘you are annoying and too big for your writer boots’.

People hate writing tips so much that on the day Elmore Leonard died a load of talentless whiners went on Twitter to say that he was wrong to say you shouldn’t start a book with weather, because lots of great books started with weather.

Anyway, I am not too big for my boots. And to prove it, here are some writing tips God gave, and sent to me, his earthly messenger:

-Never start a book with weather.

– Don’t beat yourself up over plot. I wrote the world’s greatest bestseller. It sold shitloads, and we even got it into every hotel room in the world (I love my publishers). But there are plot holes all over the place.

-The best bit in the Bible is the story of Noah’s Ark. I’m proud of it. I like to think it inspired Life of Pi.

– Short words are better than long words. And if you have to ask why, I’ll make you as unhappy as I made Will Self.

– Don’t write to get good reviews. Newspaper reviews are written by soulless people.

– Editing should never be censorship. That doesn’t mean you should keep that erotic love scene with the goat, because that wasn’t working.

– If you are in it for money alone you are an idiot. The more you chase Money, the more Money will run away from you, and the more Art will sneer from the sidelines, calling you a dick.

– Don’t write a book to get laid, unless you are already James Franco.

– ‘The road to Hell is paved with adverbs’, Stephen King. But Hell is quite a good place to hang out if you want to be a writer. Just ask Poe. Or Bukowski.

– Write what you bloody well want. Everyone is the God of the world they create. Only they are not a real God, because I am. And there is only one of me. I’m like the Kanye West of Gods.

– Don’t write a book to impress your parents. Become a lawyer to impress your parents. Or a doctor. Or a charismatic magician with a beard who can turn bread into wine.

– People will always misinterpret your work. See: the Bible. (And just for the record, I wrote Leviticus on an off day. My difficult third book. There was too much expectation, and the advance was nowhere near big enough.)

– Heaven is a library. Just like Borges said.

The world is a fucking mess.

I know. Stating the obvious. But it is. Watch the news. Watch the dead and gassed in Syria. Watch the people – me included – who say the use of chemical weapons crossed a moral line. I mean, shoot people – hell, that’s fucking fine. Maim and injure and murder away, but if you do anything with chemicals well, that’s a step too far. I mean just how apathetic are we? We’re like zombies on lithium numbed by war after war after terrorist atrocity after war.

But at least we still have the capacity to be shocked by something. At least we are still capable of giving a shit about people we don’t know. At least, somewhere, inside us there is still a sense of shared humanity.

We fool ourselves that technology means progress. Flaubert used to watch people getting excited about the railways and realised that all it meant was that people could move faster and meet each other more, but that they remained exactly as stupid as they did before. I feel the same about the internet sometimes. We pat humanity on the back for creating it but all it is doing is giving us better and more efficient ways of being stupid together.

We are all lost in our own fucking tribes, and we lose old prejudices and gain new ones.

Just as the 24 hour rolling horror show called the news has dulled our senses, so the tribalism of social media is dulling our empathy. It is mainly gay people leading the repulsion at the rise in government-endorsed homophobia in Russia, just as it is mainly women pointing out that online rape threats aren’t really acceptable. We should all be seeing these things, because they matter to us all. We are the human race. And if one human being isn’t able to live their life freely, than none of us are entirely free.

People are impressed that computers are getting ten times more powerful every ten years, but wouldn’t it be more impressive if our empathy rate increased at the same rate? If we could see ourselves as each other. If we could understand that we all come to this place with the same amount of emotions and needs and rights, and that our differences – especially those ones of nationality and faith and gender and sexuality – aren’t as important as our shared humanity. Also, without an equivalent psychological progress, technology will screw us. The computers that have now got 1 per cent of human brain power will eventually overtake us and our greed and short-sightedness will have ensured we got sloppy somewhere. And then there will be real trouble. (Just look at the NASDAQ computers, and see how fallible they are.) Yes, we’ve always been stupid, but we haven’t always been in charge of the future of nanotechnology or gene therapy.

So I think we should stop worshipping iPhones – that we go and then laugh at in five years anyway – and start working on each other. On trying to see the similarities beyond the superficial differences we seek to exaggerate in our Facebook ‘interests’ and Twitter bios. We need to realise that nationalities are constructs. (We are Syria. Just as we are gay. We are women. We are children gassed to death.)So too are genders, so let’s stop it with the Chelsea Manning giggles.

I think it’s time we stopped being obsessed with people’s sex lives and weight and language use and Gods and lifestyle choices.

I think, in short, it is time we fucking grew up.

Writers are stupid.

Writers are stupid because they do the most depressing job in the world.

Writers are stupid because they shorten their lives by sitting down all day and eating toast and smoking and writing depressing things.

Writers are stupid because they only get 0.1 per cent of royalties. Or something.

Writers are stupid because they write books when other people are out there inventing Instagram and stuff.

Writers are stupid because they will travel 300 miles to do an event for free, where twenty people will attend, eight of whom will buy their book.

Writers are stupid because they choose to write about life rather than choose to have a life.

Writers are stupid because they dream of getting invited to things and when they get invited to things they hide next to a pot-plant in the corner eating a disgusting canape made of frogspawn and getting paranoid that everyone frowns when they read their namebadge.

Writers are stupid because they write blogs expecting sympathy which they aren’t going to get.

Writers are stupid because they say they write for themselves and then go and get published and read every Goodreads review including that one star one from some bieber4eva who didn’t think the book was anywhere near as good as the sequel to *Derivative Paranormal Love Story*.

Writers are stupid because they have lunch meetings where they find it so hard to simultaneously talk and listen that they forget to eat and then have to ungraciously gobble the whole plate of Vietnamese whatever-it-is (they weren’t looking at the menu either) in five seconds at the end.

Writers are stupid because they have the best job in the world and whinge about it.

1. You hate being entered for races that you always lose.

2. You like having a clue about what is going on with your career.

3. You like to know, to the nearest ten thousand pounds, how much money you will earn in a year.

4. You like having a deadline for going in the shower.

5. You like socialising.

6. You don’t mind, on those rare social occasions, the question ‘have you written anything I might know?’ Yes! If you know my books!

7. You like being physically active for more than 1.5 percent of the day.

8. You want sex.

9. You want job security.

10. You don’t want a bad back.

11. You don’t want to answer questions from taxi drivers about JK Rowling.

12. You don’t daydream. (Everyone says writers should read. But we mustn’t forget daydreaming. Or maternal neglect.)

13. You want to be happy.

14. You can talk to empty chairs at book festivals without dying inside.

15. You could be an actor. Or a film director. Or a plumber. Or a traffic warden.

16. You don’t need to.

Inevitable sales bit: My novel The Humans is out now. It will massively improve your life.