Finding Creative Voice: How Imitation Nourishes Originality
An impediment to creativity that I suspect is responsible for a considerable percentage of writer’s block is the self-imposed burden of originality. We search our minds and hearts, our lived experience, and the world around us for inspiration. We stare down the blank page, the glaring white screen and try to drum up something clever, elegant, novel, sublime. We think if we lock ourselves in a room long enough or force pen to paper, finger to keypad, it will happen: we will “come up with something.” And yet it is during these forced attempts at originality, I fear, when our words are most likely to prove predictable, two-dimensional, or cliché. But what if we look at originality differently? What if originality isn’t something we need to strive for, but something that shows up naturally when we engage others’ writing as a model for our own?
According to T.S. Eliot, it’s good for writers to copy other writers—the more boldly, the better. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” he famously wrote in 1920. This quote has been more influential on my creative process than any other mantra. I keep returning to it over the years, and I find myself still peeling back its layers of relevance. I love the permission it gives to start somewhere other than with my own devices. I need that permission.
To begin a poem with a poem—this is how I have grown most as a writer. Sometimes this looks like borrowing a poem’s title: lifting the title, word for word, then authoring my version of that poem. Sometimes it means “trying on” another author’s voice in a given piece. Does the author speak directly, avoiding adverbs and articles, or perhaps florally, employing an abundance of lavish adjectives? Imitating another poet’s use of form presents a satisfying challenge, and borrowing on the macro level can be fruitful, too. If a book of poems written in the form of correspondence captures my attention, why not try my hand at a series of poems as letters? If a collection of poems I like hinges on gratitude for ordinary things, what important everyday things do I take for granted? What would my collection of gratitudes look like? How would it read?
The irony is that the more I have indulged the practice of borrowing from others’ writing to jumpstart my own, the more distinct and original my own writing has become. And here’s why, I think: Another’s writing gives me a new voice with which to explore my own world, a new entry point. As I probe my own experience through the vehicle of another’s particular voice, I find I have a path to walk down, a path I would not have forged on my own. I have a new set of tools to employ, a new imaginative framework for uncovering and articulating meaning.
It turns out, I don’t have to “come up with something.” The pressure is off. To get the ball rolling, I can merely look to another’s creation and lift some aspect of it that I like—a splendid and quirky title, surprising syntax, focus on a particular question. After all, doesn’t it come down to this?—we are finite creatures in a world fashioned by an infinite Creator, and when we create, we aren’t really creating—not in the capital C sense, at least—but simply arranging and rearranging what has already been created. We are purely playing with the possibilities.
Rest assured, my project will not be a clone of the seed it grows from. Nor will yours. Since each of us interacts with the world uniquely, we can’t help but create writing that is original when we borrow another’s voice. What we bring to the table will be original by default since each of us is created differently and bring to our creative efforts a singular accumulation of life experiences. Just as we resemble our parents but are not them, so the voice that emerges will resemble the writers we imitate, yet will not be theirs, but our own.
Originality isn’t manufactured; it comes naturally, and imitation greases the wheels. So, next time you’re stuck staring at a blank page or a glaring white screen wordless as the desert is dry, copy a poem that intrigues you verbatim, or the opening of your favorite novel, or a paragraph in an article or essay you wish you had written. Notice what choices the author made in their use of words, images, sentence structure, grammar and punctuation. Delight in those choices. Then try your hand at your own version of their work and see what emerges. Release yourself to their devices. Walk down the path they have forged, and let that path take you to new places, new discoveries of beauty and truth, new experiences of making art.
