There’s an understanding I’ve been trying to get to for some years now. I seem to talk around it a lot when teaching and I think a lot of my writing is in pursuit of it. Yet I’ve never quite pinned down what it is. Maybe it’s a little like the Questing Beast that you build your life around finding but never do, yet it’s the journey that’s important and all that, blah blah. No, not that. Questing after something you’re never going to find is just escapism.

On the other hand, it’s quite possible its exact nature is not ever meant to be pinned down. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that it’s actually more real than stuff that you can.

Let’s start with a dichotomy that turns up in various forms but might as well be called clever and stupid. There are stupid books, it’s said, like conveyor belt romance, fantasy, crime and the such. Then there are clever books, like the ones which win the Booker prize or were produced by writers officially designated clever by university professors, literary critics and so on.

The problem is that stupid books are often written and read by clever people. And clever books aren’t always quite as clever as they seem. If you removed the warring tribes that tend to congregate around extremes of opinion, the differences between clever and stupid aren’t so clear cut. You look at a stupid book and find that it has odd moments of beauty and wisdom; while clever books can contain incredibly dumb passages.

Ah but! say the tribes. That may be true but a stupid book has many more stupid passages than a clever book and vice versa.

Maybe. But while the war’s raging, I think a much more interesting, if not elusive, question is being avoided.

The problem with genre, including literary, and the commercial/fan pressure to make a book mostly stupid or mostly clever, and the over-powering myriad reasons for producing more of the same, is that it all pulls you away from – well, that elusive something.

It has elements of the transcendent, I know that, not in a religious sense necessarily, more in terms of intelligent insight, and revealing awareness, and being able to intimate in the spaces between plot points, and characters’ movements, and dialogue, and sentences, truths that can stun the mind and heart even if the brain can’t quite work out why.

If as a writer you want to capture this kind of transcendence you face two major obstacles. First, you have to live and breathe the quest in your own life. And, oddly, that’s a quest that can take you away from writing. Because writing is always going to be secondary to experience, even if its brilliant execution can recapture the experience for other people.

If you have an insight into say the collective mind of a row of trees, hinted at in the rustle of leaves in a light wind, and the eyeless and steady stare of their enduring purpose to join the sky and the earth, then the last thing you want to do is try to write about it.

But if you do, then you are starting at a great disadvantage to the writer who simply wants to create a stupid or a clever book. For he only needs to mine what already exists in the field and shake it about a bit until it looks different enough to attract an editor then a bunch of readers.

For the writer who wants to capture an indefinable truth or first hand connection, however, where the hell does he start? He has to tell a story but he’s not particularly interested in going from beginning to end with try/fail dramas for his main character along the way.
He just wants to capture that moment. He can almost see and smell it, and he knows where it’s going to take place. It’ll say appear in the morning-after-the-party conversation, about half-way through the story, between his heroine and her flat mate. Both are hung-over; the heroine is actually an ancient spirit which used to embody a dragon that has been stolen by the security forces and will probably destroy the world if she can’t stop it. Her flat mate is an ordinary girl who knows nothing of the her friend’s true destiny. But ordinary people possess a deep-rooted if not conscious sense of the miraculous. And so it is that although the two are talking about boys and booze and the next party, the universe is dancing gently on their words.

The rest of the story has to be constructed around this moment. Yet he knows that will inevitably produce weaknesses – not important to anyone else who is also seeking those transcendent moments. But his experience is that even editors often approach a story mechanically, looking for proper structure and steady characters, kidding themselves that a derivative one-liner by the main character also lends the story originality. And because his writer’s heart is inevitably spending time with the magic moment to come, his writer’s brain is not always quite as attentive to the accepted basics as it probably should be.

So, eventually, he concedes that he has to try to do both. To write a solid story which will please the majority of editors and readers, that contains the required ‘conflict’, and the just-enough-but-not-too-much difference to the norm, and characters that may appear to be wiser than the reader (e.g. wizards) but who should never actually make anyone think too much, and absolutely no philosophising – although it’s allowable to write spiritual redundancy as interesting vagueness if it’s literary fiction.

Good luck with that, he says to himself.

I was once having a conversation with a top-selling commercial author. At that time, he had five novels coming out in as many months. He was very critical of literary authors who don’t actually write very much. He, on the other hand, sat down and wrote for eight hours a day, every day. For some reason, I mentioned William Kotzwinkle who for me in his heyday was one of those writers who just went for the magic. He was brilliant enough, and perhaps lucky also to have started out in writing when publishing wasn’t quite so mechanised, to get away with quite a few wonderful but totally varied novels slipping into the mainstream. Passages of his writing are transcendent – they induce emotions in the reader by a kind of conspiracy of shared feeling, rather than by him having to tell you what to feel.

The writer I was talking to blinked at the mention of Kotzwinkle then went on to tell me a story about his last holiday, and how he’d just written all the time during it.