Philip Pullman: The thing every writer needs to overcome

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.

To read the full article on bigthink.com, click here