Heart of the Original

In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn't know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn't feel bad about filling it.

Many make do with China Mieville, quite simply one of the science fiction writers in the UK.

Words have the device-like detailed architecture of diatoms, and a glowing soul. A word will present itself as armatured with potential, as though with arms open, calling via your intuition to another word in another environment. You can enrich the stuff of life by bringing together two words which have never, ever been introduced to one another before. Perhaps because they dwell in different contexts or in the jargon of different disciplines, they are never held in the attention at the same time. Yet when put together, their cogs mesh as if they were made for each other and a massive amount of energy is released.

I was doing a story about a childhood visit to the circus and wrote ‘They pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a fourth beat the bejesus out of me.’ I found this mistake of the missing third clown very funny but didn't know why. When the mind has to jump a gap, the spark it fires can tickle the brain's surface or ignite unused pathways, depending on the guidelines placed on either side.