The Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of Writing

All my writing life I've tried to write things that hope to appear as not having been written. I don't like writing that's writing, whether I'm the one writing or whether I'm reading something someone else's written.  When I write something that seems written I don't accept it as mine, no matter how well written it is, and try for something else or, after trying, give up completely and start over from scratch.

I don't know how I got this way, I don't want to know, how I got this way is unknowable or, if knowable, the knowing would undo the way I go about things, and present my aversion toward writing that's writing as a complex tangle of neuroses, fears, compensation movements...in other words, knowing would complicate an already complicated situation, the situation of being a writer who doesn't tolerate the appearance of writing in his own writing or in the writer's he reads.

Examples of writing that's not writing flourish in the work of minor poets more often than in the work of major poets. Why is this? And in primitive novels--Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote, for instance. By the time a reader comes upon Trollope, writing has become enough of a cultural obsession that it enters the age of psychology where writing is more or less the clear thinking of "seeing everything", (it was Henry James who said of Trollope, "he sees everything.")

Exempted from this withering standard are books written meant to be read primarily for informational purposes. The book I'm reading now, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, by China Mieville in which the writer, a novelist at heart, writes non-fiction in such a way that the reader feels swept up and then carried away by the writer's headlong obsession with his subject matter, is this sort of book. And whether or not it's good, bad, or indifferent writing hardly matters.