Hey everyone, just a question that’s been on my mind. Sometimes I’ll introduce a character or plot element into my writing that feels at place in the piece but alien to the way I write. I’ll look back at a sentence or phrase, and feel like someone else ghost wrote it, or that it spun organically out of the material. How much of your writing feels like it came from somewhere else? What role does that feeling play in your writing process?
David
I listen to music for most of my day. I listen to it while I do pretty much anything, so naturally, I listen to a lot of new music every day. And I began to realise while writing for this class that most of my thoughts, the way I express things are coming from the songs I listen to. It’s like an amalgamation of a lot of the emotions I find in these songs, which is what I think makes my writing unique to me. I think I use the stories, emotions, and lyrics from music and take them into a new environment with different contexts. I’ve thought about whether this is my own work or not a lot, and I’ve started to believe that it is, since at the end of the day everyone’s writing is influenced by something, for me that something is usually a song, or more accurately many songs.
Hi David,
Thanks for the question. I personally think that a lot of writing is actually influenced by previous readings, particularly my poetry. I find myself reading different poems or styles that certain poets tend to stick to, and I start to imagine ways that I can be inspired by them. For example, after I read some of Tony Hoagland’s poems, I started to experiment with his typical matter-of-fact imagery and description. After I read E.E Cummings, I began to play with formatting and punctuation in my own work. William Carlos Williams’ famous “The Red Wheelbarrow” still reminds me of how powerful a uniting image can be for readers. I do not believe this influence is a negative thing at all; when I experiment with all the amazing tips that these poets gave me, my own original thoughts and ideas begin to flow through, and I begin to witness what I myself am capable of.
Hi David,
I think that while no piece is entirely uninspired as we learn from everything and everyone around us (and thus other writers), an idea (or sentence or character or plot or phrase or…) is yours if you came up with it independently without consciously thinking of any other works. Even this seems too rigid a definition though and seems more like a framework for identifying plagiarism or copyright infringement than originality. Subconscious influence from other writers is inevitable and is in some ways necessary for growth as a writer, but plagiarism aside, I think work can be ours even if it is partly someone else’s because no one will tell the story exactly the same way we do or use a sentence in exactly the same context as we do.
I’m currently in the middle of a major songwriting kick and I’ll sometimes find the melodies I come up with independently already used in songs written by other artists I listen to. This isn’t because I copied them, but because my style grew from listening to and incorporating elements of theirs, and it isn’t plagiarism because I don’t string all of my sections of melody together in the same way that they do. It’s the same with my lyrics and other writing; if I write a metaphor or sentence fragment or idea that someone else has already written and published, I still won’t be using it in exactly the same context and it won’t have exactly the same meaning in my work as it does in someone else’s. It’s like how words in English are all built with the same 26 letters of the alphabet, but an ‘e’ sounds different in ‘beatle’ than it does in ‘breath.’ The ‘beatle’ ‘e’ isn’t copying the ‘breath’ ‘e’, they are simply one unit fulfilling different roles in different contexts. It’s the same with larger-scale elements of writing.
I think Maia put it rather well, and I think about it that way too. Anything I conjure up is just a synthesis of life experiences, of things I’ve already witnessed. I agree with Owen too though, that I often I look back at things I wrote and honestly can’t believe it. Where did it come from? Who did that? Does this feeling of disconnect make it any less mine? No, I don’t think it does. I think that working with the experiences we’ve had and the things we’ve read doesn’t mean we’re not original. I think instead it means that our work is entirely original, because no other person on earth has had exactly the life experiences we’ve had, or read exactly the books we have, or watched exactly the shows we have, or had exactly the interests we do. Everything we’ve witnessed is inspiration, but our synthesis of it is entirely original. That’s the beauty of writing and art and why everyone should create: to share your work with the world. That’s how things evolve. Through time.
Hi David,
I’m actually of the mind that very little of what I create is new and that nothing I make is entirely my own. But for me, this is not necessarily the point of creative work. What I seek as a writer (and dancer) are exciting syntheses/amalgamations/groupings of influences from different parts of my life that might reshape in a tiny way how other people see the world. What I read, watch, listen to, observe, and participate in all settle into my body and somehow push me in different emotional directions. I can’t always consciously articulate how those feelings manifest in my work, but I think the mystery is in part what keeps me going. Audre Lorde talks about this in a piece linked under this week’s syllabus. She says that it’s not about searching for new ideas, but that “there are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out.”
I feel like, as with anything, my best writing comes during flow states, when my peripherals seem to blacken and focus solely on the page in front of me. I lose track of time, of place, of myself, and yet words seem to flow with such deliberateness that I cannot account for. I often look back over whole paragraphs I’ve written in these moments without the slightest memory of writing them. Sometimes, it works. And others it doesn’t. I think the way we write is inevitably guided by what we read. Sometimes I’ll write a beautiful sentence only to realize that 60% of it is from some story I read last week. Words have a funny way of working their ways into our heads without us knowing and lodging themselves there for days, weeks, even months. I think that, in that sense, these words our not ours, but part of me thinks that they must be. I think that the new combination of words that we choose to put together, however much influenced by what we’ve written is ours. Novelty, in so much as something that is new, is our possession. There’s a scene in this movie Garden State where Natalie Portman’s character does a strange, funny dance and her friend stares at her blankly. “What was that?” he asks, “I wanted to do something that no one had ever done before” she replies. This, to me, is ownership. We must be constantly putting new things into the world, things conjured from something into something new. Novelty is our possession.
Beautifully expressed, Owen.