Apparently, most of us suffer from superiority complex. We think we know more than we do. We think we’re cleverer than we are. We think we think better than we do. Really clever people don’t actually think like this. They know they don’t know everything, and don’t think they’re particularly clever.

Which is odd. It means that in most conversations, business meetings and interviews, the people doing the most talking – the most emphatic talking anyway- are those who aren’t actually that bright. Who’d have thought?

Does this mean that writers who do the most writing aren’t the brightest writers? Does it mean that the characters doing the most talking in your stories aren’t the most interesting?

Can you write if you don’t have a superiority complex?

Do writers write because they’re tired of spending hours listening to other people going on about a great Two-for-One they got in Tesco the other day, wondering why they aren’t doing any of the talking despite having much better stories to tell?

One time, researching an article I was talking to a guy who gives guidance to people who’ve been in religious cults. We had a conversation in which he talked quite a lot about how he and his wife had joined a cult but when he’d left, she’d stayed and they’d broken up. Hmmm, I thought, resisting the urge to offer him a bit of therapy. He also spoke with that all-knowing superiority complex kind of voice and did most of the talking but I wasn’t getting much stuff for the article and politely said goodbye. About two weeks later, he phoned me because, he said, he had an interesting story for me. It wasn’t of course and I started to think about other stuff while he rambled on.

At one point, he said, “I’ve been reading a really fascinating book lately,” and I said, “‘The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck’.” He said, “That’s right,” and carried on with his story.

Now, we had at no time previously discussed books or the kind of literature he might like. So I was interested in how I could possibly know what he was reading right then. I thought about intuition, or cognitive synchronicity, or plain old extrapolation, but nothing quite fit. While I was thinking all this, he carried on apparently oblivious to what I’d done, as if it was just the kind of thing that passed as normal outside of religious cults.

So, locked up tight inside his superiority complex he’d missed a bit of, well, if not magic exactly, at least something that actually might have been worth talking about.

Here’s the thing: critics tend to also adopt the superiority complex when discussing books they admire. Does this mean they tend to miss the magic moments in those books? (Assuming, of course, they contain any?) Or is it more the case that because they aren’t capable of seeing the magic, they automatically opt for books that don’t contain any?

This would explain, to me at least, the utter predictability of many so-called classics of literature. Virginia Woolf, for example, was the market leader in writing from a superiority complex, producing prose utterly devoid of magic but perhaps appealing to those with the same kind of complex.

This is the danger of paying too much attention to what your teachers tell you in school, especially so-called good schools. Writer, teacher, pupil, critic, the approved system of what constitutes art – it’s all a club that the intelligent but gullible are encouraged to join. Inside, they’ll feel the reassurance of others of kind, all knowing exactly why what is considered good literature is the best. But in order to join, you have to put on the club costume which is a kind of tastefully grey superhero costume, obscured by a tweed jacket, with ‘SC’ in gold across the heart.

I think this is saying that if you want to be a really good writer, one who produces the odd bit of magic in amongst memorable, as opposed to well constructed, characters and stories that live-along instead of follow-along, then you have to lead with your not-knowing anything about anything and keep your knowing a lot firmly in the back seat, offering its views only when asked.

In other words, make your superiority complex your slave not your project manager. Superiority is a cult: it offers surety and the agreement of others but it completely excludes, destroys if possible, any hint of non-cult behaviour that you might actually need if your stories are going to court magic.

I suspect my ex-cult guy joined it in the first place because he was looking for magic. But the odds were against him, given the hierarchical nature of most cults and their obsessive need for members to feel superior to non-members. He left but his wife didn’t. It seems as if he then constructed a new cult for himself: being a cult therapist, which I guess is another kind of superiority affair.

In summary, then, I think I’m saying it’s wise to try not to develop a superiority complex, as a writer, that can make you miss the magic. Some commercial writers, for example, can get caught in the superiority complex of relentlessly pursuing their 5000 words per day targets, then bragging about it or, worse, encouraging new writers to join their club. Literary writers can develop a superiority complex that’s based on almost the opposite approach: writing next to nothing but re-writing it endlessly anyway, under the belief that quality lies in less.