Saddlebalckwell Letters #1
Intentional and Unintentional Influences
Read Saddleblasters' prior letter on his website.
Part C
After stewing on your letter, the grand question I’ve reached is: what are we trying to do with our influences? Why do we want to write like a particular person, and ultimately, what are we trying to accomplish when we write at all?
I will use tim rogers as a common ground — most of our readers will have no idea who he is, but I suppose that’s okay. Although we both tried to copy his style, it seems that we did so for entirely different reasons, and therefore focused on entirely different elements. This can be seen in the forms that our emulation took: I wrote personal essays, and you wrote a short story.
When I set out to copy tim rogers, I didn’t have the list of attributes that I sent you in mind. I just had a feeling. I’ve always found it somewhat easy to steal someone’s voice — in fact, it often happened unintentionally. The most intentional part was, in fact, the so-called “poetical conclusions.” Here is an example from an essay I wrote almost ten years ago:
This store exists next to the magic man who ignores fireworks. This store exists next to a lady with one large earring and one small earring. This store exists next to every dream I have ever had for myself. This store exists next to the alternate imagined outcomes of every scenario I have ever been involved in. This store exists next to everyone back home, living their life as I don’t watch. There are more worlds in my head than anyone can ever know (including me).
Essentially, the conclusion had to tie together various aspects of the essay, usually with some vague cosmological imagery, ending with a vaguely poetical and profound sentence. I considered this vitally important, and you’re right — this is what separated a completed essay from a heap of words. Nowadays, I find many of my attempts a little trite — but maybe they still work, and I’m simply being ungenerous to my past self.
What was my goal when I emulated tim rogers? Well, I wanted to express myself. I wanted to create myself. In his work, I saw vulnerability, sorrow, and regret transformed into something powerful. I wasn’t able to express myself in person. I didn’t know how to tell anyone what I was feeling. On top of that, I felt that I was totally uninteresting. When I talked to people, they got bored. I’m a quiet person in a loud family; I got used to not being heard. I saw in Tim Rogers’ style a means of making myself someone worth listening to. I saw a means of making my emotions powerful and meaningful to other people. My relatively boring and mundane life could be made beautiful through the power of literature.
A large part of the appeal of fiction is escapism. It allows us to see beyond our own life and our own circumstances, and imagine ways in which things can be different. It broadens our idea of what it means to live a life at all. Of course, being the main character in a novel is a lot different than living a real life. They live a simplified life, where everything is in service of the story. They get to be the most important person in the world, because the world they reside in is built around them.
When tim rogers — or any memoirist, really — writes, they make themselves the main character. Since they are real people, we, the readers, get the impression that it is in fact possible to be the main character, and to live a more pure and literary life than we previously thought possible. By transforming their life into art, we are deceived into believing that their life was art to begin with.
However, when I started writing my personal essays, it quickly became apparent that I was lying, and eventually I came to understand that he must have been lying as well. I found it easy to make the events of my life seems significant and dramatic in retrospect, no matter how dull they were in the moment. I turned people into who I wanted them to be — I turned them into characters, and my life became that of a main character. But this was only true in the writing — in real life, I was still just as bored and boring as ever. It was all an illusion.
I wasn’t even inventing anything. I wasn’t inserting new characters or changing events. I was writing everything exactly as it happened. The lie was entirely in the style. By narrating events as if I was writing a novel, I distorted the whole thing.
Of course, there’s no way to accurately depict real life using only words. It’s always going to be an approximation. Style is the means by which we distort the truth for our own purposes. By focusing on mundane details, we can create verisimilitude — the illusion of realism. Conversely, by focusing on emotional impressions, we can attempt to depict the world as we see it, rather than how it truly is. By carefully utilizing all these techniques, we can do anything we want.
This is why emulation is so important. When I copy a writer, I’m trying to expand my toolbox. I want to be able to do what they can do — not so that I can write exactly what they wrote, but so I can write exactly what I want to write. And when I use all these tools to write according to my desires — that’s where we find my voice.
Fiction is built around certain traditions and standards. These vary over time and across cultures, but it’s fair to say that anyone who writes fiction is following a tradition, otherwise they wouldn’t write anything at all. They might not know the tradition; they might only know one author. But, that author will have known of at least one other author, and so on and so on. Because of this, fiction can never be a pure expression of self. It follows certain rules and standards, whether it’s a novel, a short story, or an epic poem.
When we start out, we copy not only the style but the content — I noticed that in the story you sent me, it was all about things that tim rogers was interested in, not what you were interested in. This is what makes it seem like a cheap imitation, or pastiche. You’re only interested in these things because someone else was. It’s all superficial.
But as we grow, our voice fills in the gaps. We use stylistic tricks and adapt them to our own purposes. I wonder if the writer you so obliquely mentioned is Umberto Eco? He writes in a variety of styles, about a variety of historical periods, but he continually finds himself writing on the same themes and dealing with the same problems. Most likely, he set out to write each novel not realizing that he was going to end up in the same place again. He was probably trying to do something completely different. And yet, despite his attempts to disguise his voice, we keep discovering him in his works again and again.
When you write, you can’t help being yourself. Especially if you continue writing over a long period of time. You can wear myriad different hats, but they’re all going on the same head.
So perhaps, trying to write about conscious influences was a fool’s errand, since it’s the unconscious ones that end up being the most significant. I can’t tell anymore who I sound like, or if I sound like anyone. I can only occasionally see glimpses of my influences in the words that escape my fingers.
As for Kant, the more you question me on the topic, the less I know what I mean. But I definitely consider him an element of my toolbox. Perhaps it is less stylistic and more of a worldview. I conceptualize my understanding of the world via his ideas of synthesis, judgments, intuitions, etc. So, when I want to talk about how we think and how we process information, I feel Kant speaking through me. I suppose this is similar to how mathematical thinking has influenced you.
I don’t feel haunted by my influences the way you do. I never set out to be original. If anything, I set out to be a copy, but I tried to copy so many disparate authors at once that I became original by accident, if I have actually become original. I would read biographies of authors, figuring that if I copied their lifestyle, then my work would turn out exactly like theirs. I didn’t just want to copy their work, but their career trajectory as well, and perhaps the trajectory of their entire life. It took a long time for me to believe that my work could have any value if it wasn’t exactly imitating someone else’s work that already had value.
I suppose I’m being contradictory. Above, I said that I copied in order to express myself. Now, I’m saying that I copied in order to hide myself. And perhaps this lays bare the paradox of writing fiction: that we don disguise after disguise, all in order to express our innermost self.
On a more prosaic level, we’ve talked before about muscle memory. When we’re searching for a word, we’ll keep reaching for the same one again and again, even if there are plenty of synonyms that would work just as well. In the same way, we’ll reach for the same sentence structures, the same clauses — even the same punctuation… We can try to mitigate this with a thesaurus or an editor, but perhaps it’s best not to be too meticulous in this respect. After all, those little choices are what make a work feel like the product of a single mind.