What Nietzsche Taught Me About the Coming-of-Age Novel

I am writing a coming-of-age novel. (Who isn’t?) In fact, I have been writing a coming-of-age novel for almost a decade. I’m a slow writer. An edit-as-I-go-er. The village idiot of my writing group. And, yes, you guessed it, a known procrastinator. (Nice to meet you. Hi.)

Procrastination is part of my process. Somewhere, deep within the grey matter of my subconscious, something important happens when I step away from the page, close the laptop, forget for a moment about the characters I spent the bulk of my 20s crafting. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

It was during one such procrastination vacation, three years after I’d completed my MFA then moved halfway around the world and back again, that I found myself sitting in an interior classroom in the local university, enrolled in a course titled, “Nietzsche and the Nietzscheans.” I hadn’t taken a philosophy course since college, but I was allotted six credits of premium procrastination each semester by my employer. And Nietzsche only required four.

When an old friend heard about my latest return to the classroom, he supposed the class would be good for my writing.

 “I doubt it,” I typed back. What could Nietzsche, famed misogynist, rumored incel, and brother of an antisemite, possibly teach me about craft? I had enrolled in the class to take a break from writing my novel. I was offended by the thought.

Then, in a scene straight out of Spiderman (2002), Nietzsche assured me he was something of a novelist himself. He published Thus Spoke Zarathustra in four volumes between 1883 and 1885 — around the same time Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Robert Louis Stevenson published Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Suddenly, I was intrigued.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra tells the story of an old hermit named, you guessed it, Zarathustra, who travels up and down a mountain a bunch of times, giving speeches, and eavesdropping on the locals, etcetera. None of this matters, and the book isn’t, technically, very good. It is, however, interesting — especially to someone trying very hard to take a break from working on a coming-of-age novel.

Let’s skip to the interesting bit, which appears in the first of 22 discourses, wherein Zarathustra describes the “three metamorphoses of the spirit.”

Basically, according to Nietzsche — er, Zarathustra — the spirit must undergo three metamorphoses to reach maturity. To illustrate the first stage, Zarathustra conjures for his audience the image of a kneeling camel, awaiting heavy cargo be placed on its back. For Zarathustra, this well laden camel represents the immature spirit, which is weighed down by received knowledge and the values of others.

Alone in the desert with his burdens, the laden camel throws off the cargo and transforms into a nihilistic lion who kneels to no god and wants nothing more than to be the ruler of all that it sees. But what may look like freedom is really obstinance — an equal and opposite reaction to the values bestowed long ago upon the lion when it was a camel. (Bear with me!)

Finally, the spirit undergoes its final transformation from lion to child. The child, Zarathustra tells us, represents innocence and forgetfulness — a new beginning. At last, the spirit, neither burdened by the values of others nor acting solely in response to them, is capable of creating its own values — of willing its own will. At last, the spirit is mature.

🐫 🔜 🦁 🔜 👶

So, why does any of this matter? And what does it have to do with writing a coming-of-age novel?

When I returned to my draft, I saw camels and lions everywhere — and a protagonist in need of a final, child-like transformation. At the heart of the form, that’s what a story is, right? A character is one way at the start of a novel. And then, 300 pages later, they are something else — forever changed by the fictional events in between.

 I’d long since worked through an early draft issue wherein my protagonist moved, unchanged, through the novel. My protagonist now underwent change. But Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses provided me a new framework capable of housing a dynamic emotional journey fit for a protagonist who must overcome, not only the worldview prescribed by her parents, but also the nihilism typical of teenage rebellion.

I flipped to my first act and emphasized my protagonist’s camel-like qualities. What had she so far learned of the world from her parents? Which of their values had she accepted without question?

Then, I turned to the second act, which chronicles the protagonist’s reaction to a loss of faith in her world as she knows it. There, I gave her metaphorical mane and a burning desire to reject the familiar and embrace the opposite. Like Nietzsche’s lion, my protagonist formulates an equal and opposite reaction to the values she received as a child camel. And, like the lion, just when she thinks she’s outsmarted her antagonists, she realizes her actions haven’t solved a thing.

Finally, I turned to the third act, where I gave my protagonist a child-like creativity and a chance at a new beginning — the will to will her own will.

Thus spoke Zarathustra, as they say.

“Georgia, I fucking told you that reading and studying Nietzsche would help your writing!!” my friend said when I mentioned my breakthrough.

The lion inside me gnashed its teeth, but my friend was right. If there was one thing my draft needed at the time, it was a clear and transcendent character journey. It wasn’t enough for my teenage protagonist to simply reject her parents’ values. She needed a third act — an opportunity to will her own will.

And who better to school me in the art of overcoming nihilism than Friedrich Nietzsche, the philologist turned Wagner fan boy turned novelist turned philosopher, who spent the majority of his short life thinking and writing about what happens to us when our gods die — and how we might transcend nihilism in the aftermath.