Can I first say that I freakin' loved this movie? Harry Potter, sorry, Daniel Radcliffe shined in this "based on a true story" narrative the intertwined lives of Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. It's chock full of great moments of acting, dialog, and (most important to this blog) insight about the writing life.
There are lots of lessons to be gleaned from this film ranging from the importance of a writer's group of friends and comrades in typewriters, the passing on of a writer's legacy, and how far to push against the status quo and how important is that for a writer.
But the thing I really want to zoom in on is this line that young Ginsberg hears in his poetry class:
"There can be no creation before imitation."
Allen's dad is a renowned poet of the traditional form and structure and rhyme, and Allen is, well, not. He loves his Whitman and the breaking of the structure to discover the freedom to say something that to him is more honest. His professor is, in essence, saying that he needs to forsake free verse to write rhyming poetry, but is he really? (Plot point I won't spoil for you.)
However, even if we simply take him at his word, the statement holds true. All writers tend to begin by imitating the writers who influenced them. Then they tend to imitate the writers to influence them away from those initial influences. Then, if they're really blessed by the muses, they are able to synthesize all those influences together with a bit of their own personal experience into some amorphous, mysterious literary alchemy we call "style."
True story. When I started writing I was a C.S. Lewis clone, both in tone, format, vocabulary, and themes. Being the next C.S. Lewis would have made me tremendously happy. Then I fell in love with Hemingway's simple and direct style and tried to put all those flowery Lewis things behind me. Well, it wasn't long before Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O'Connor stole my heart, and I embraced the Southern part of my life and tried to spill that onto the page. A few years later, I discovered (again) the action and adventure of planetary romance, mythical fantasy, and hard-boiled detectives (re-beginning with Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, and Raymond Chandler, respectively). After that, I tried my hand at being a straight-up pulp writer, but that suit never quite felt like it fit correctly. Close, but no cigar, as the purple cliche goes.
Eventually, I had enough experience as a writer under my belt to put all those influences together into something that feels like me. You can call it style or whatever, but for me, it's just a matter of writing the stuff that comes from my influences -- without ever actually trying to write stuff that sounds like my influences. Don't miss that -- it's important. When you discover who you are as a writer, you actually incorporate your influences into your work without having to actively try to incorporate your influences into your work.
We may tear up the old to build the new, but we are still made up of all the bits and pieces of everything that came before, everything we've read, everything we've experienced, every influence we're consumed.
But it all began here:
"There can be no creation before imitation."
The trick is this -- you can never let it remain there. If you do that, it spoils.
No comments:
Post a Comment