Envy and Imitation

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel or
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

It's okay. Every writer does it. I do it. You do it. The best-sellers do it. The indie savants do it. 

We tend to ape -- sometimes unintentionally, sometimes on purpose -- our favorite writers and pick up on the traits we enjoy about their work. 

When I started writing, I was determined to be the next C.S. Lewis. Not the Narnia Lewis but the Space Trilogy and the Till We Have Faces Lewis. Because of that, my writing was overblown and way too wordy. And I also sounded British--using British turns of phrase and UK slang. Don't take my word for it. You can trust the fine folks at The New Yorker and The Missouri Review, who both told me the same thing. I still have both rejection letters in a binder with other memories from my writer's journey. 

When I started my Bachelor's classes in Literature, I found out how much I loved the novels and short stories of a certain boisterous and burly man-baby named Hemingway. So I moved on from the verbose intelligence and heavy vocabulary of C.S. Lewis for the clean, crisp, succinct prose of Papa Hemingway. 

The trouble was that I was still playing the imitation game. 

Only something was changing, something I wasn't even aware of.

Every Man's Education

After Hemingway, I went down the 20th Century American Literature rabbit hole. There was Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes (yes, stories not just poetry), and Shirley Jackson. As their ideas and styles added to what I had learned to apply from Papa, I noticed my way of writing changed significantly. I retained my love for simple sentences and direct nouns and verbs without lots of adverbs and adjectives, but I turned away from trying to be so "Literary" and embraced the "Southern" of my youth. 

And so began my phase of "Southern Literary" where I found the themes of Welty, O'Connor, Hurton, etc. weaving into my fiction. However, the voice was always changing from the Lewis/Hemingway copycat to something new that blended bits and bobs from lots of influences. 

It was during this time that I wrote for the award-winning Cyber Age Adventures. Being a literary writer, you can imagine the fun I had crafting superhero stories with my lens of literary impact and import. Somehow, it worked. Between Frank Fradella's RPG-inspired adventure yarn set in real-world physics and repercussions, Tom Waltz's quasi-military approach, and my focus of American Literature, we created something unique and engaging in the world of superhero fiction. 

But my inspiration still had some growth to come. 

Imagine the confusion and prosaic mush created when I started exploring for work of the great pulp and pulp-adjacent writers as I tried my hand at some New Pulp Fiction stories thanks to some introductions by friends like Bobby Nash. To do my homework at writing pulpy tales, I dug into the stories (both novels and short stories) of folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, among others. 

With these new influences, my style took another shift. The simple prose of Hemingway was still similar to the simple, direct prose of Chandler, but the types of stories were suddenly allowed to become a lot more, well, more exciting physically and emotionally rather than just the intellectual excitement of my Literary focus.

This began a new phase of what Derrick Ferguson and I often called Literary Pulp. For us, that meant deeper than mere surface characterization, dialogue that does more than just advance the plot, and looking for real-world interactions that didn't sugarcoat the time periods we were writing about. For me, it was just a continuation of what I had been doing since discovering Lewis and Hemingway. Lewis made me want to deal with spiritual and philosophical topics in genre fiction. Hemingway made me want to create characters who, when they spoke about a topic or when they avoided a topic, revealed a lot about who they were. Same uniform, just a different ballfield.

Nourishing Corn on My Own Plot of Ground

Okay. So what did I learn through that journey toward becoming Sean Taylor, the writer? Are there lessons that can help other writers push through their own journeys from imitation to what Emerson called "self-reliance"?

Sure. If you know me at all, you already know I love both tutorials and lists, and when I get to put them together in a single article, I'm suddenly the happiest little clam in the world. 

So here goes...

1. Embrace your idols. 

It's okay to be inspired to imitate. We learn by copying the works of those we enjoy reading. Their stories teach us about story structure, how to write dialog, when to break grammar rules -- all those wonderful techniques that ultimately fill up our writing toolkit and become what we call a personal style and voice. 

Take those inspirations. Work with them. Play with them. Turn them upside down and inside out. Put your own spin on them. Play with all your favorite toys. 

2. There can't only be one. 

Now, here's the trick, isn't it? This is your journey to discovering who you are as a writer, not a rehash of the movie Highlander. 

Imitating a single writer makes you a copycat. Imitation several at once makes you a dedicated learner of the craft. The more you learn from multiple writers, the more you integrate seemingly disparate voices into your own work, and that makes you become unique. Even if you use all the same ingredients, you bake your pie from a different recipe. 

3. Start purging. 

There will be lots of tidbits and style doodads that you find no longer work for you the more comfortable you become in your own writer "skin." That's all part of learning. What doesn't work anymore, excise it. Purge it like last month's leftovers. Eventually, you are left with the style stuff that makes you happy and makes you, well, you. 

Just like I left behind the British-isms of Lewis, you may need to cull the standard adventure motif of Tolkein or Donaldson's ten pages of how brown the mountains and tunnels were. You may need to cull the reliance on the internal monologue you copied from Faulkner. You may need to ditch the sudden shifts in verb tense and -person you picked up from Ed McBain. They may have gotten you to where you are, but they no longer suit you.

4. Good writers borrow. Great writers steal. 

This quote is usually attributed to the poet T.S. Eliot and it is often quoted along with a variation on it by Aaron Sorkin: “Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” Regardless of who said it when and how, it's absolutely true. 

Beginning writers obsess about how much their work may remind them of the folks they admire. Great and practiced writers stop caring after a while. In fact, it's safe to say that all those things you think you will be called out for copying won't even register with most readers. Sure, there will always be reviewers who are paid to make both fair and unfair comparisons, but those are your typical readers. 

Steal proudly. Steal broadly. Steal without any discrimination. Do you like the way Eudora Welty writes winter scenes? Fine. Take it and shove it in your toolkit. Really dig the way Chandler can chop dialogue into snappy fragments? Chisel it right out of his book and hang onto it for your next story. 

New in Nature

Now, before you look at that list above and start to craft a plan, stop. Those aren't steps in a printout from Mapquest in 2006. You don't aim for step one and then turn off Highway 20 onto step two like it's some kind of organized plan. 

What is it then?

It's a synopsis of what happens to us as writers. It's a description of the process more than an outline to follow. It's something organic, not ordained. Something passive, not planned. 

It's one thing to be aware of it and acknowledge it and not let it consume you with imposter syndrome. But it's another thing entirely to see it as a roadmap for your writing goals. That shift in thinking is both subtle and crucial. 

The next line in the Emerson quote that started this essay is this: 

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ultimately it comes down to this: TRY.

Enjoy what you enjoy and let it shape you as a writer. Read, consume, mulch it in your mind, turn it into brain food, rinse and repeat. It's really as simple and as complicated as that. 

[Link] WHY CLASSIC CRIME FICTION WAS OBSESSED WITH FASHION

by Via Berkley

Early in my career as a novelist, I received a critical review of my work complaining that I described, in too much detail, the garments worn by my characters. It may have been fair comment. I was in my twenties at the time, a debut crime novelist. My writing instinct was correct, though, if perhaps not my delivery, and twelve books later, I’d like to explain why:

Furnishing the reader with details of the appearance of characters, and perhaps especially their clothes, makes good storytelling sense. More even than the shape of a face, or a glint in the eye, the cut, quality and state of a character’s garments, their footwear, the state of a suit and the quality of a piece of jewellery reveal important details about the history, social class, financial position, personality and in some cases intent of a character. As a mid-century vintage nerd, occasional dressmaker and former fashion model I am well placed on the details of garments, with my interest being particularly focussed on the time period I am currently writing about—post-WWII—so it is entirely appropriate that I have given my new 1946 PI heroine Billie Walker a keen eye for seams and collars, brooches and brogues. But before you disregard this attention to detail as the skewed interest of a female writer, as that early reviewer did, I’d like to point out that this descriptive technique has form with one Raymond Chandler, creator of one that most enduring and observant character, Phillip Marlowe—not a fashion victim but a hardboiled PI. Chandler’s novels are filled with detailed descriptions of bouncers in pink suspenders, authors in white flannel suits and violet scarves, and even speculation on the fashion choices of a man who furnished an office: “The fellow who decorated that room was not a man to let colors scare him. He probably wore a pimento shirt, mulberry slacks, zebra shoes, and vermilion drawers with his initials on them in a nice Mandarin orange.”

Just feast your eyes on this sartorially splendid scene from The Long Goodbye:

“She was slim and quite tall in a white linen tailormade with a black and white polka-dotted scarf around her throat. Her hair was the pale gold of a fairy princess. There was a small hat on it into which the pale gold hair nestled like a bird in its nest. Her eyes were cornflower blue, a rare color, and the lashes were long and almost too pale. She reached the table across the way and was pulling off a white gauntleted glove and the old waiter had the table pulled out in a way no waiter ever will pull a table out for me…”

Marlowe (and his creator) notice the clothes, the hairstyle, the gloves and what they signal about the person wearing them. This is no mere description, not simply the delightful painting of an aesthetic picture, but a type of cheat sheet for every character Marlowe encounters. It’s true that in hard-boiled we are accustomed to descriptions of hard men and femme fatales with faces like angels, but the clothing takes us a necessary step further.

Read the full article: https://crimereads.com/why-classic-crime-fiction-was-obsessed-with-fashion/

[Link] Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" (1950)

Editor's Note: This is perhaps the single finest essay on the art of writing pulp detectives, and I'm thrilled to have found it available online. Enjoy! -- ST

Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-fashioned novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque did not appear that way to the people who first read them. Writers like Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in the modern sense because they dealt largely with uninhibited characters, many of whom were about two jumps ahead of the police, but Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make bestsellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.

The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news. If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it. The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway. The detection of quality in writing is difficult enough even for those who make a career of the job, without paying too much attention to the matter of advance sales.

The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public by a slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds on thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are a study for more patient minds than mine. Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Rather second-rate items outlast most of the high velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about that dull. This is very annoying to people of what is called discernment. They do not like it that penetrating and important works of fiction of a few years back stand on their special shelf in the library marked "Best-Sellers of Yesteryear," and nobody goes near them but an occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly and hurries away; while old ladies jostle each other at the mystery shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with a title like The Triple Petunia Murder Case, or Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue. They do not like it that "really important books" get dusty on the reprint counter, while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies on the news-stands of the country, and is obviously not there just to say goodbye.

Continue reading: http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html