If you're going to write a book banging on about the importance of originality in thought and expression, you'd better make sure it's written in a really god-damn original way. And Steve Aylett's prose is, right enough, so original that after a few pages many readers may be forgiven for thinking that that's quite enough originality for one day, thanks. Like Nabokov, but to an infinitely greater degree, Aylett creates sentences so utterly stripped of banalities and stock phrases that they almost repel: it's not so much that he is not at home to Mr Cliché, but rather that he's waiting behind the front door to garrotte Mr Cliché and bury him under the back patio. You fly over his craggy paragraphs exhausted, searching desperately for somewhere smooth enough to land. Quite often, you end up travelling somewhere else by mistake.

I said earlier that readers might be forgiven for finding it all too much, but then I am a more tolerant person than Steve Aylett, who himself shows no sympathy whatsoever for those content to recycle other people's ideas, or to consume the results with bland satisfaction. ‘While many claim to crave originality,’ he says, ‘they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it.’ But though he acknowledges the revulsion, he obviously thinks we should all be doing more to get over it, instead of just buying further paperbacks from writers who ‘have as much artistic ambition as a fossilized spud’.

Part of the fun of this book is seeing him get specific about this, as when he suddenly launches an unexpected attack on other writers:

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.

Even better are the pithy throwaways.

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

These things are thrown out mid-paragraph, like a knives lobbed into a crowd by a horribly committed dadaist. In the end, surveying the range of lifts, borrowings and imitations in most artistic creation, Aylett concludes with magisterial derision: ‘It's pathetic to have someone else's gut feeling.’

True originality, by contrast, ‘increases the options, not merely the products’. He does touch on a few writers that he seems to admire (Tove Jansson, Greg Egan and – bafflingly to me – Michael Moorcock are all mentioned with approbation), and enjoins readers to ‘be ravenous’ in order to dig out their own gems. ‘Real creativity is a ferocity of consciousness,’ he suggests, and for him this begins at the level of individual word choice, which gets an attention that I found particularly gratifying.

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.

Any Aylett sentence will provide examples of such unexpected and productive collocations – as, for instance, when he describes Antonin Artaud as having ‘a face like a wet kestrel’, or when he writes that ‘A system is never so good that it couldn't be improved by a hen on a rampage’. In fact one of the surprises of Heart of the Original is just how practical some of the advice in here is, despite its quasi-parodic clothing. I loved this:

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.

The book is itself a demonstration of the technique, compressed and elided at times to the point of incomprehensibility but frequently exhilarating anyway. He refers in passing, for instance, to Jesus' ‘suicide-by-cop’, or writes of creative expression that ‘It leaves you raw enough to feel your reflection granulate across a mirror's surface’.

Somewhere beyond the literary ectopia characterising Aylett's writing, there is – perhaps surprisingly – a core of real emotion and belief which in lazy shorthand you might call political. In this book, it's especially exhilarating because it's not just about other artists and how they should be assessed, it's also about how you can think and feel and react more creatively yourself. The consequences of this go beyond the world of the arts and soak into almost everything else. As Aylett cautions, ‘You may even live a life with repercussions.’ ( )