If you meet a writer at a cocktail party and he tells you he’s a student of the human condition, ninety-nine times out of a hundred he is self-published, and not because it’s the sexy new business model of the future.** Furthermore, you are dealing with a person who describes themselves in phrases like “a student of the human condition” and thus you should probably immediately excuse yourself to go find more tiny food on a stick or raid the veggie with ranch dip before all the baby carrots are gone. Alternately, feign death.

I am skeptical of claims that writers are somehow in touch with truth or more observant than the rest of us, because I have spent too many days wearing my shirts backwards and with socks stuck to my back, and most of the writers I know give me the impression that they, too, have known the shame of stowaway socks. Great truth and all that strikes me as so much blither-blather designed to add to the mystique. (I cannot believe that any of my long-time readers still believe there is any mystique–if by some bizarre chance you do, please tell me, and I will tell you about the weird way the skin grows on my little toes in an effort to banish it forever.)

However.

That said.

Some authors do this thing. Actually, it’s a lot like Boneclaw Mother’s thing–an occasionally painful insight, but a very clear one, rephrased in a way that you wouldn’t have thought to phrase it, but which you recognize the truth of immediately. It’s kind of like comedy, really–telling you something you already knew but didn’t quite realize you knew, in a way that’s funny, except that authors aren’t required to be funny all the time. Pratchett does that frequently, to the point where we practically expect it now, which has its own problems. Gaiman has his moments. Even King has his moments, bizarrely enough, although sometimes I think he’s just firing in the dark and sometimes he nails it and sometimes it goes bafflingly wide.

This is not essential to good writing. Let me stand up and say that now, in case you’re about to start obsessing over whether your story contains Vital Human Insight. There are authors I love that never hand me those weird little truths. They just tell a damn fine story, and I read them over and over again and love them dearly. (Literary fiction is a lot more obsessed over this than genre, I suspect.) Don’t worry about that.

But Ibbotson occasionally nails a phrase or something, and it just…works. She describes an unwanted and inconvenient mongrel as having an unshakable conviction that he is deeply loved, and I know that dog, because he lays under my desk and farts while I write. She describes a character has having the vulnerable hollows at the back of the neck that prevent the parents of small children from killing them, a phrase I read aloud to Kevin, who knew exactly what she was talking about. She describes rubbing the place behind the ears where large dogs keep their souls, and of course anyone who knows a large dog knows that spot perfectly well. (These are the easy ones that I can pull out of context, but she does it a lot. And well.)

I wish I could do that.

I don’t even want to be able to do it for the sake of truth or beauty some noble crap like that. I want to do it because if you do it right, it hits the reader over the head and they spend the next week wandering around composing rambling incoherent blog entries about it.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think this is something you can try to do. I think you either do it automatically, or it doesn’t get done. And Ibbotson started writing when she was fifty and had herself fled from the Nazis as a child and perhaps some insights are only available when you have put in fifty years of dues and had terrible things happen to you. I don’t know. Honestly, it’s not something to worry about, because I suspect you could choke up on it really easily and produce some really constipated prose.