IF EVER THERE was a writer revered as a saint-like figure, Amherst’s gothic 19th century poet Emily Dickinson is it. Gnomic, ethereal (possibly anorexic) and given to appearing without warning at doorways in front of startled visitors. Before she was even a ghost, real or imagined, hers was a wraithlike presence.

She’s the kind of writer – visionary, hallucinatory, transcendental “Clogged/only with/Music, like/ the Wheels of/Birds…(and) the gorgeous/nothings/which/compose/the/sunset” – who perfectly fits the romanticised view of the writer.

In a new book of Dickinson’s poetry, The Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions), one of the book’s editors, Marta Werner, writes of finding by accident a hand-written poetry fragment of Dickinson’s in the Amherst College Library “when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope….Look at it, here, flying on the page, vying with light.” As the British academic Mark Ford writes in a review in the London Review of Books Werner’s tone is sacramental, as if the fragment were a saint’s relic.

Writers first began to assume the role of secular saints during the Enlightenment. If God was dead or dying, who was going to read life’s signs? Without an overarching plan – indeed, without a cosmic plot – who was going to impose order on chaos? Humans have always told each other stories, as allegorical, metaphorical or actual clues in navigating the apparent random joy and hideousness of existence.

But it wasn’t until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the-writer-as-seer – half-sacred, romantic and blessed with far-sighted, mystical powers – became popular. Writers were mad, bad and dangerous to know: drinkers, living on the edge, possible suicidal, and with more passion than ordinary folk (But even the legendary Lord Byron towards the end of his life wearied of the poet-thy-name-is-eternal-passion malarkey, writing to a friend in 1821: “I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”)

Like all writers, I became a writer because first and foremost I was a reader. I loved books and like every devoted reader I felt a shock of recognition and intoxicated wonder when I read something that felt profound and true, as if the writer had access to some secret instrument inside me, inside everyone, which deciphered the human soul. Like Eudora Welty, I believed writers were guided by “the Geiger counter of the imagination” towards lived truths.

I had almost no life experience and yet, like everyone, I contained a universe of emotion. At ten I read my grandmother’s copy of David Copperfield and understood perfectly what it felt like to be abandoned, alone, striving. I was Jo in Little Women and later the young man in Sons and Lovers and I knew what it felt like to say goodbye to a statue and walk out into the rain (A Farewell to Arms). The external facts of a character’s life were irrelevant: it was the truth of being alive I understood, and recognised.

By the time I got to Tolstoy and George Elliot and Fitzgerald Austen and Bronte I was a goner. By then, when I read great writers, I thought they were secular saints too. They knew something I wanted to know, so it’s true that books turned me into a writer.

I was much older, and published (just before I turned 30), when I came to know personally these Gods descended to earth. I remember very well the first time I met an actual, published writer (when I was still in my twenties, unpublished, and trying to write). It was a dinner party, and the famous writer was there (Australian, at the height of her fame, who shall remain nameless). I could barely speak. Really. I could hardly say a word. I was dumbstruck.

Later, still before I was published, the great Doris Lessing spoke at a literary dinner in Canberra. I’d flown down to hear her (The Golden Notebook for a time was like a map of life to me). The next day I was alone in the bookshop attached to the festival, when Lessing walked in. How to say it? My heart leapt. She was only a couple of metres away from me, then breathing right beside me, browsing the stack of books on the table. There was no-one in the shop, no-one, except Doris Lessing, the sales assistant at the cash machine, and me.

I happened to be holding my copy of The Diaries of Jane Somers (Lessing has always been streets ahead of everyone; it was the ‘80s and it was the novel she wrote under a pseudonym, to prove how hard it is for unknown writers to be published, let alone reach an audience). Why didn’t I ask her to sign it? Why didn’t I strike up a conversation? I even knew certain people who knew her, who even lived with her (she famously kept an open house and I knew someone who knew someone who knew Robyn Davidson (Tracks) who for a time lived in one of her spare rooms. She was famously generous to young people). I was a young person, and yet I was speechless.

It’s one of the small regrets of my life that I never spoke to her. I’m very sure she had people gushing at her from all quarters and – most likely – she didn’t need another spray. Yet I wish I had – sometimes famous writers can be so intimidating to people that, like extremely beautiful outcasts, no-one ends up approaching them. Personally, I’ve always been rewarded by starting up conversations – even unlikely ones (inadvertently amusing John Coetzee at dinner, for example, with tales of my white-ant ridden kitchen floor. No-one else wanted to sit next to him). I found the Nobel Prize winner, the late Seamus Heaney, totally charming and funny as hell. Ditto Margaret Atwood and Margaret Drabble.

By the time I got to personally know most of Australia’s writers, and a few English and American and French ones, I understood what Peter Carey meant when he said that your writing is somehow more intelligent that you are. In other words, there is the writing, and then there is the writer and – sometimes – there is only the barest symmetry between the two. A writer can be a complete bastard in his wide-awake life, and a complete angel in his work. Writing is something else, apart from the writer. While a writer’s writing of course only belongs to him or her, and is as individually stamped as a dream, I’ve come to believe in a slightly different version of the writer-as-saint or the writer-as-God.

Recently I re-read Middlemarch. How did Elliot come to possess such vast, but such intricately nuanced, human knowledge? How does David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas know so many moments of existence, such fine, minute details of the breathing heart? How does Tolstoy do it – encompass such breadth and depth of oceanic understanding? Tolstoy was, in fact, a religious zealot, given to visionary dreams and wild utopian dreams, and was to the end full of demonic energy. Mitchell has an autistic son and – no disrespect intended – Mitchell’s writing has a certain brilliant savant quality (I’ve only met him briefly and he is lovely, but so, so unnervingly bright, genius bright, right off the scale).

I give you David Foster Wallace, a human born as if without a skin, his head so filled with wonder and awe and symbols and knowledge and love, it is hardly a wonder he could not bear to live. It took me ages to understand that writers – probably all writers – feel life more keenly than other people. You don’t need to be Sylvia Plath to appreciate the swings of joy and sadness but you do need a certain kind of emotional wiring to goad you into desiring a physical expression of intellect and emotion, into producing words on the page.

I didn’t know I lived at a higher pitch than most people until I was embarrassingly old. Now I know it is this excessive passion that forms the writer, even that outwardly dispassionate John Coetzee. Writing doesn’t have to have the blood and guts and etoliated madness of a Plath, or the anorexic with-holding madness of Dickinson. It can fly into space like a Lessing piece of science fiction or dig deep in the mud like a Heaney poem. But now I think the greatest writers are sort of idiot savants, living vessels, through which human consciousness is poured. With writing at its highest form – Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Patrick White, Marilynne Robinson – the writer acts like a conduit.

It’s not the muse. It’s work, but not as we know it. It’s witch-craft, conjured, willed. It’s a freak of personality, like a super athlete with a freakish set of genes allowing him to run. Now I think there’s a sort of cosmic grading of writerly talent, from Shakespeare down. Every writer has it, a trickle or an ocean. Tolstoy was awash, his own sea.