In Under the bugle-beaded bonnet I said, as something of an afterthought, that because what I most notice in excellent writing is the things I couldn't do myself and ideas which I must work to apprehend, I associate excellent writing with ideas and things I don't do and only sort-of understand. In which case my writing - which by definition is ideas and things which I do do and do understand - is not excellent.
It's not just me, is it? At any rate, this phenomenon's a funny mixture: part of the necessary schizophrenia of the writer. On the one hand, humility becomes writers, since none of us are Shakespeare. And it's only the truly awful (or very, very beginnery) writers who have so little sense of what's good writing (because they have yet to learn to be bad), that they think they're terrific. On the other hand it takes a thick streak of confidence that you have something to say and some craft with which to say it, or none of us would ever show our first poem to a friend, or fight for years to get published. And if I had a pound for every writer I know who wanted to be a writer from the cradle, naturally went off to study English at university, and then was so ravished by Eliot (George), or Eliot (T S) or whoever, that they didn't dare write a word of their own for a decade, I'd have... well, enough money for a nice little splurge on eBay, perhaps. For all sorts of reasons I thank my stars at least once a week that I read Drama at university (and if it hadn't been Drama, it would have been Art History. I wonder if I would have ended up in much the same place?)
But any psychotherapist would say that it's a common and often really pernicious tendency to automatically, unconsciously, judge ourselves and what we do in the worst possible light: to put the worst construction on others' behaviour: to use what happens to prove to ourselves that we're worthless. It's about feeling criticised all the time, about feeling the fear and not doing it anyway, about longing for approval and safety and... you know the stuff I mean. And since it's that set of feelings which gives birth to your Inner Critic, admiring other writers is a wonderfully convincing disguise for it to don, in order to convince you that what you write isn't worth writing. So pure, so clever and intellectual, so unutterably daunting, so (in the case of Eliot and Eliot) true...
But all the dauntedness which others' writing breeds in us really means is that excellent writing is excellent writing. Yes, we admire ideas we didn't have till we read them in someone else's work; yes, we admire prose constructed by a different mind with a different ear; yes, we admire storytelling which sweeps us away, because it's more or less impossible to be swept away by a story you're telling yourself at the rate of - what - 300 words an hour? But, dare I say it, someone else might be thinking some of those things about our work. Just a sentence or two? Just a minor character? Just a natty little plot twist three-fifths of the way through?
Many years ago, when it was getting increasingly difficult to hide the fact that although my children were at school I was spending my life writing instead of getting a proper job, I started admitting to it when people asked what I did. Mostly, people were interested and admiring, but there was usually a subtext - and sometimes a text - of 'What makes you think you'll succeed?' This is a question which from anyone who knows anything about the creative industries can simply be realistic. But in a culture where showing off comes rather above speeding as a social crime, it still only needed half a glass of wine before my socialisation broke down, and what I really thought came out: 'Because I will be good enough.' Once or twice the question definitely had a hostile undertow, and because I may be nicely - and Englishly - brought up but I, too, have an assertive undertow, I looked them in the eye and said, 'Because I'm very, very good.' Twice my interlocutor just turned on his heel and left without another word.
No, I'm not Shakespeare, or either Eliot, or LeCarré or even - oh, pick a writer you admire so much that you read their work with a sort of despairing wonder about how they begin to do it, and then pick a writer you admire slightly less passionately, and I'll still not measure up. But I am me, and if that means I have the same limitations in being a writer as I do in being a human being, I'm going to have to live with that. On the other hand no one else is me, and I can do me, if nothing else, better than any other writer in the world ever has, or ever can.
