Sometimes, great writing makes me angry.

It’s nothing to do with the ideas inside, of course. Poets and bestselling authors are good at their game. What bothers me is when those ideas are expressed with such perfect beauty that I cannot hope to match them.

There might be a degree of professional pride to this. When I gawp at an old poet like T.S. Eliot or a modern writer like Samantha Harvey, I’m just jealous. Yes, they might be better trained than I am. Yes, they likely took more time on their writing than I did on this article. But, in the main, I’m left bitterly squinting at how someone can be so damn good.

There’s more to it, though. It’s often said that the joy of great literature lies in poets and writers expressing feelings and thoughts in ways we couldn’t imagine. They name emotions we didn’t know we felt. They dig up what was deeply buried away. But this joy is a coin with two sides.

I would like to invent a word: Psychoklepsis. Psychoklepsis — literally “soul-theft” — is when someone expresses your inner life better than you ever could, and you resent it. It’s when you hear a song, read a poem, or watch a movie, and you say, “I can’t express myself better than this stranger expresses me.” Psychoklepsis feels like some magic of the page ripped open your soul and helped itself to your feelings. Ridiculous, of course, but humans can be ridiculous.

Psychoklepsis is something that many writers and artists have to deal with. Left unchecked, it curdles into paralysis — the feeling that everything worth saying has already been said, and said better. But in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, we explore a way out.

As Barbara Cartland put it

This week, I spoke with the bestselling author Philip Pullman about his books, life, and ideas. The full video interview will be available on the Mini Philosophy Substack. In the middle of our conversation, Pullman shared a very psychoklepsic anecdote:

“There was a postmodernist who wants to tell his girlfriend that he loves her, but he cannot say, ‘I love you,’ because those words have been spoken without irony by Barbara Cartland. But he really does love her, and he wants to tell her. Finally, he works it up, takes her in his arms, and says: ‘As Barbara Cartland would say, ‘I love you.’”

Pullman used to teach creative writing classes, and he noticed that many of his students were terrified of using the same words that writers had used before. There was this postmodern urge to do things differently. They’d “do it without punctuation, or without speech indications, or in the present tense… something to show that this was really literature.”

The problem, of course, is that the constant need to reinvent the wheel creates some weird-looking wheels. The stories stutter along. The prose hides the ideas. We’re left wondering why they chose to write “My heart’s fervour flies from my chest to your visage” when “I love you” would have been much better.

I read a post on Substack a few months ago where a writing teacher posted an article titled something like: “300 synonyms for ‘said’ that you should use.” Many comments under the post were grateful. Some lambasted the degeneracy of the modern language. Why can’t kids use these words anymore?

I thought at the time that most of these words were ridiculous. I distinctly remember moments in my own reading history when an author leaned on these “300 alternative words” and thinking, “Just give it up, already.” The desperate, contrary need to be different — to be florid — pulled me completely out of the story. It turns out Sir Philip agrees:

“Did you ever read Biggles when you were young? Well, do you remember all the words he used instead of ‘said’? ‘Expostulated,’ ‘ejaculated,’ ‘exploded’? That sort of thing. That is a sign of embarrassment. You do not want to do something that everybody else has done before, so you try and do something different and find yourself again doing what people have done before.”

Learning to be unembarrassed

I am a recovering psychoklepsic. When I first started writing, I was nearly crippled by the anxiety of not repeating what other philosophers have done. I long accepted that I couldn’t do “proper” philosophy as well as the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein or Elizabeth Anscombe. I recognized that I didn’t have the time, skill, or inclination to do huge multi-tome books on “The History of Philosophy.” So, what exactly was I adding to all this? What is the point of Jonny Thomson in a world already full of brilliant philosophers and beautiful writers? As Pullman put it, I felt embarrassed. I felt shy.

There was no one solution to my own embarrassment. I started writing, people started to like it, and that ended up becoming a virtuous circle. I grew in confidence and heard a small voice whispering: “People want to hear what you have to say.” In our interview, Pullman and I talked about when he first started writing stories and how his English teacher — Miss Enid Jones — said they were very good. It’s unscientific and utterly anecdotal, but I do suspect that behind every writer there is at least one important other who said, “This is great. Well done. I like reading your stuff.”

It’s only now, a fair few years into writing, that I think there’s a better answer to the problem of why write when others can write better. And it’s that while everyone might have different styles (or even talents) for storytelling, the stories they have to tell will be unique to each person. There are more than eight billion people in the world today. Each has an autobiography. They have an angle on the world that is different from yours. But each of those has imagination and creativity. They have a way of telling a story.

Near the end of our interview, Pullman tells a story about when he was stuck writing The Amber Spyglass. Pullman’s books lean on imagery from William Blake, and so Pullman opened a book by  A.D. Nuttall to help him out.

“I found myself thinking, ‘Oh dear, perhaps I got it wrong, because what does Nuttall say about Blake and the Orphic?’ What does that mean? I better look at that and find out.

And then I thought, ‘Oh, stop, hang on. What are you doing? He is not writing a book. You are.’ And I found myself remembering that wonderful line of William Blake’s: ‘I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’ Brilliant line.

So, thank you very much, A.D. Nuttall, lovely book, enjoying it very much. Do not believe it. And so, following Blake, I went back to not reasoning and comparing, but creating.”

It’s common to feel embarrassed, shy, and self-conscious when we are writing. It’s easy to feel the need to be different when someone else has done it so well already. But, as the saying goes, the woods would be very silent if the only birds that sang were those who sang best. So, sing anyway. Sing badly, sing well, sing as much as you can. If you want, sing in the same key as everyone else and sing the same words that Barbara Cartland already sang. The point was never to out-sing the nightingale; our “business is to create.”