Endspiration...

... the clarity of the last minute perspective

I finished the book I’ve been writing - The Gatherers – yesterday. This is about the eighth time I’ve said it’s ‘finished’, but the reason I know it really is finished this time is because the final draft activated ‘endspiration’. Endspiration is what I call the perspective that arrives at the last possible moment. An explicit form of sight that is impossible to manufacture but always gloriously and reassuringly obvious. After dragging yourself through a complex, chaotic context to communicate meaning, finally you can see whatever it is you are doing with complete certainty.

In the context of my book, endspiration manifested in a sudden clarity on what the book was so obviously lacking. I tore through the one hundred and thirty thousand word manuscript this week in a kind of frenzy, tweaking here and there and making additions and cuts all to make the narrative cleaner and more specific and had the recurring thought ‘why the hell didn’t I realise this was the problem all along!’ But this is why endspiration is so important. You can only see what is wrong when there is no time left to meander and explore. My deadline this week is partly time related and partly financial. I reached what Sun Tzu referred to as ‘Death ground’. Tzu’s phrase describes the moment in a battle when retreat is no longer possible and the soldiers understand they face a fight to victory or death. Unsurprisingly, soldiers on ‘Death ground’ are a lot more effective than ones who think there’s a chance of running away. My version of death ground is not so dramatic, I’ve been prioritising writing the book for years and now it’s time to focus on earning some money, but this phenomenon comes to us all in the form of a deadline. And this is why deadlines are critical.

Endspiration does not just arrive in the creation of art. I encountered it a great deal in business. I remember being in a taxi on the way to a VC’s office and suddenly realising that the pitch deck I had spent months on had the wrong underlying argument. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. So I re-wrote the story of the raise in the back of the cab and left the VCs office a few hours later with the promise of the £2m we required.

It happens in social conversations too. How many times have you been out with a friend and had lulls in the conversation only for it to come alive and reach new heights just as you are putting on your coats outside and about to say goodbye? It’s as if everything you needed to say suddenly appears with complete clarity and you joust with each other to articulate all the things you realise you forgot to say!

Of course the ‘Death ground’ we are all moving towards will be the final moments of our lives. What clarity of perception will come to us in the form of endspiration then? What insight will we have our lives have been preparing us for? It will be something wonderful, don’t you think? Perhaps the most meaningful realisation all our previous experiences of endspiration have been preparing us for.

In other news, I am now looking for a literary agent. If anyone knows any good ones likely to be interested in a thriller that reveals the secret history of our species and how we became disconnected from nature - let me know. I’m pitching it as Alan Garner meets the Da Vinci Code. I take my heroes and villains all across the country, from London to Cornwall, Wales and then into some of the remotest parts of Scotland and the novel includes most of my favourite things - the land, sea, forests and moors of this great country, surfing, barrows and henges, birds of prey, follys, grand aristocratic houses, hunter gatherers, druids, gallic poetry and owes a great debt to historians like Ronald Hutton, Francis Pryor, Chris Harman, James Suzman, David Graeber and David Wengrow and David Lewis-Williams and feminist writers Mineke Shipper, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Gerda Lerner, Jay Griffiths and Angela Saini. There are lots of original ideas in the book too, though, that I’m very excited about. And so many serendipitous discoveries during the research that at many stages I began to wonder if the Universe was just using me to tell this story. Could it actually be true?

As always thanks for reading, please let me know what you think. And please also share any experiences of ‘endspiration’ you’ve had. If I can find enough of them it might even be another book.

Dan