Economist Writing Every Day

If novelists are so smart, why don’t they succeed at much besides writing fiction?

When I read a good novel I think “the author must be very smart to be able to write this and understand people so well”.

But novelists tend not to be very successful at things in life other than writing fiction, certainly not at anything like the rate of people who write good non-fiction books.

Just off the top of my head, people who wrote good / highly acclaimed non-fiction books while also being highly successful in other fields:

• Julius Caesar
• Marcus Aurelius
• Benjamin Franklin
• Richard Feynman
• Winston Churchill
• Barack Obama
• JD Vance
• Many top economists (Keynes, Hayek, Friedman)

While off the top of my head, novelists who reached anything like that level of success in other fields include:

… No one?

The best that comes to mind is people that started philosophical movements related to their writing, like Ayn Rand, Scott Alexander, or Eliezer Yudkowsky. But that’s clearly a different kind of success than for most non-fiction authors. Likewise when I ask Claude the best examples I get are doctors, lawyers, and academics, not world leaders. I’ve been kicking this idea around for years but was inspired to finally write it down because I found out that before Ben Hur was a movie it was a wildly successful novel, and the novel was written by former Civil War general Lew Wallace (not a great general as they go, but its still impressive to be a general at all). But I still think that is the exception.

In fact, worse than just “not being world-changingly successful”, some of my favorite living novelists sometimes seem crushed by the weight of everyday tasks like giving public talks, maintaining relationships, or completing their work anywhere close to on time.

The paradox: if novelists are so smart, why aren’t they more broadly successful?

Potential resolutions:

1. I’m wrong and novelists actually are broadly successful.
2. Novelists are so smart, but tend to have other deficits that keep them from being broadly successful, or from wanting to try, e.g. being neurotic introverts
3. Novelists aren’t so smart, it’s more of a narrow skill that we shouldn’t expect to indicate general intelligence, like being good at painting or football.

The question can be flipped: why can’t / won’t many very successful people write fiction? Are they more grounded in the real world when it treats them well? I’m not ‘very successful’ but I write a lot. In my case I’m not convinced I could even write a bad novel, much less a good one. Wouldn’t know where to start.

Cunningham’s Law Update: John Giebfried writes in with excellent counterexamples along the lines of resolution #1-

• Novelist Victor Hugo was also a French Senator
• British Prime Minister Disraeli wrote many novels
• Czech President Vaclav Havel wrote plays
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who I knew as the author of Le Petit Prince, was also a pilot who won the Legion D’Honneur, and won the US National Book Award for his non-fiction