The Mystery of the Rules: Somerset Maugham’s Paradox on Storytelling
William Somerset Maugham delivered this deceptively simple observation about novel writing at a time when literary criticism was becoming increasingly formalized and instructional. The quote emerged from his decades of experience as one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and commercially successful authors, a man who had written dozens of novels, short stories, and plays while simultaneously wrestling with the persistent question of what actually makes fiction work. This aphorism captures a particular frustration that creative writers have grappled with throughout literary history: the tension between the desire for concrete guidance and the reality that great art often defies systematic explanation. Maugham likely made this quip during interviews or public addresses in the mid-twentieth century, when he had already established himself as both a celebrated novelist and a thoughtful commentator on the craft of writing. The quote’s simultaneous assertion and negation—proposing rules while declaring them unknowable—reflects his pragmatic personality and his skepticism toward the overly theoretical approaches to literature that were gaining ground in academic circles.
Maugham’s journey to literary prominence was hardly the path of a born writer. Born in 1874 in Paris to a British family, William Somerset Maugham grew up in considerable privilege as the son of a lawyer and diplomat. However, his early years were marked by profound loss and displacement. His mother died when he was just eight years old, and he was sent away to boarding school in England, an experience he found traumatic and which would later inform much of his exploration of alienation and emotional detachment in his fiction. Rather than immediately pursuing writing, the young Maugham studied medicine at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, qualifying as a physician in 1897. This medical background proved invaluable to his later work; it gave him intimate exposure to human suffering, moral complexity, and the hidden lives of ordinary people that would populate his novels and short stories with striking psychological realism.
Despite earning his medical degree, Maugham never established a meaningful practice. Instead, he gradually devoted himself to writing, beginning with short stories and plays before finding major success with his novels. His breakthrough came with “Of Human Bondage” (1915), a largely autobiographical novel that explored themes of love, ambition, and disillusionment through the life of Philip Carey, a young man torn between artistic aspiration and practical necessity. The book struck a deep chord with readers who recognized in its pages their own struggles with desire and the gap between youthful dreams and adult reality. Following this success, Maugham became extraordinarily prolific, producing novels like “The Moon and Sixpence” (1919), based loosely on the life of painter Paul Gauguin, and “Cakes and Ale” (1930), a witty satire of literary life in Britain. During the World War I era, he also served as a secret agent for the British intelligence services, a fascinating detail of his life that remained relatively obscure for decades and underscores his pragmatic, action-oriented approach to existence.
What made Maugham such a distinctive literary voice was not experimental innovation or formal complexity but rather his commitment to clarity, psychological insight, and moral ambiguity. He believed that a novel should tell a story that engaged readers and entertained them, yet he also insisted on honest portrayal of human nature in all its complicated messiness. This philosophy put him somewhat at odds with the literary modernists of his era, particularly writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, whose experimental techniques Maugham viewed with a mixture of respect and skepticism. He was suspicious of critics who elevated obscurity to virtue and rejected the notion that good writing had to be difficult or obscure. Instead, Maugham cultivated a clear, precise prose style derived partly from his medical training, where precision of language could be literally lifesaving. He also harbored a deep fascination with storytelling traditions from around the world, reflected in his extensive travels through Asia, which inspired both fiction and his philosophical reflections on narrative.
The quote itself encapsulates Maugham’s characteristic wit and epistemological humility. On one level, it is a joke, a paradox designed to puncture the pretensions of those who claimed definitive knowledge about how to write fiction. Yet it operates on a deeper level as well, reflecting genuine philosophical uncertainty about the nature of creative work. Maugham had observed countless novels succeed and fail, and he recognized that commercial success, critical acclaim, and artistic merit did not necessarily align. Some books that followed all apparent rules of good writing fell flat, while others that seemed to violate every convention captured the public imagination and endured for generations. The observation is not nihilistic—it does not argue that there are no rules whatsoever—but rather suggests that the truly important rules might be unteachable, residing in some combination of talent, instinct, experience, and perhaps luck that cannot be codified. It also reflects his distrust of literary academia and the growing industry of creative writing instruction that was beginning to proliferate in universities.
Throughout his career, Maugham was famously candid about his approach to writing as craft rather than sacred calling. He admitted he was not a genius in the Romantic sense, that he worked methodically, and that much of his success derived from careful observation and disciplined effort rather than divine inspiration. He wrote nearly every day and kept meticulous notebooks filled with observations of human behavior, conversations overheard, and anecdotes that might later be incorporated into his fiction. This working-class approach to literature—treating