“Imitation and Sincerity”
* * *
What advice to give writers?
It all depends.
For the sake of simplicity, there are three kinds of writing. There is the writing one has to do because someone asked them to do it, there is the writing one BELIEVES they would like to do, and then finally the writing one simply does because they must—for reasons which are personal and mysterious.
The second and third types would be special cases. Most of the essays on writing out there are for those who fall into the second and third. But unfortunately, people who desire to BE writers cannot be helped, at least as I see it, by the formulae of writers who have already figured out how to write their stuff. Every aspiring writer has to figure out for herself how to get the job done, but what I say here will perhaps help the aspiring writers know how to avoid certain traps, while helping people who have been asked to produce writing to do so without pain and too much “friction,” as the tech gurus say.
For whatever reason, some people have fallen in love with the idea of BEING a writer. Such a person will think a great deal about a future in which her pages are printed, bound and made available in stores in already finished form. This is a very exotic sort of self-imposed torture, I think—it’s one I would not wish on many people.
Yet I know how it feels, from experience. Though I am fundamentally not a novelist, I have briefly in the past believed I would like to be. Of course no one was asking me to produce a novel. The much bigger problem was that I did not have a strong desire to write novels. I was acting like someone who desired to have climbed Mount Everest yet hates hiking and climbing, let alone camping. I was someone who felt the need to write poetry (as well as cerebral essays), and therefore was probably more like a skateboarder, a gymnast, or even a ballet dancer—none of which are primarily about getting from Point A to Point Z. What I love to do involves compressing experience, feelings, and ideas into short moments and relatively small spaces—a kind of reduction alien to the novel. That is why the very notion of describing characters and places, objects in the world—trivial facts, as far as I was concerned—would make me shudder a bit, even if I admired certain novels.
While there are some who need to write novels, I was not one of them, and this naturally should have been a signal, but I also knew that I was young and could not be sure that my inclinations should be trusted. Instead of listening to my gut, I pushed myself a bit—which is not a bad thing.
Yet I was also deceiving myself by telling myself “this isn’t a novel, I am merely writing creatively”—which is a common technique among people of a particular temperament who have a NEED to write but wish to act on this need in a way that is more socially acceptable. “Novels are more legitimate than poems, so I should write them instead.” But I did not yet realize that this wasn’t possible. I should have known, because when I was entertaining the idea of writing a novel I actually felt like Paul Valéry, a French poet, who had a certain disdain for the type of sentences one has to make thousands of in order to produce a novel, or even a single chapter of a novel. I do not remember the particular, very banal example he used, but it was funny and vindicating, since it was so very typical of the sort of novelistic description that I was not interested in writing. I also hadn’t read Valéry’s views on the novel back then, but my gut was expressing its contempt, which is not the same as not loving mountain climbing. Indeed I had a little contempt for mountain climbing, so the desire to have climbed Everest was more likely a sublimated desire to have done something else. Climbing Everest was a metaphor which I mistook for reality.
Novels are also interesting because to do one one must be quite practical and down-to-earth—and, more importantly, very at home with the particulars of the world (something I, in certain ways, am not)—even if there is almost nothing practical about painstakingly crafting a hundred and fifty or more pages of realistic make-believe which no one even asked for. The novelist, it would seem, is a funny paradox—a sort of enigma.
On the other hand, I had a good reason for thinking I should write novels. Like an actor, I enjoyed doing voices that were different from my own, and was capable of saying things which I may not have thought or said in my own voice or character. In fact, this piece I am writing right now is itself a kind of imitation of the voice of numerous “how-to-write” essays I have read and recently come across while searching the internet for a piece to assign which would help you draft and revise your own first essays. I thought to myself, I can do this kind of thing, even if it comes off as a little self-indulgent.
In fact I can’t help but imitate styles and the type of writing I am reading, even if I don’t care for it. Even back in the day, when I really liked what I had just read, I had this need to see if I could do it almost as well. I had been misled by Nabokov, who had written a totally unique book with a highly charged, poetic prose which really amazed me. And it tricked me into believing I wished to create novels. The issue, again, was that I didn’t want to write novels—but I did sort of want to be Nabokov and to write like him. The problem was that there can only be one Nabokov, and rather than lightheartedly imitating something, I was in danger of forming an identity that would shackle me to this cruel master and prevent me from developing as I would have developed under a master who granted me a healthy sense of space and independence, while also serving as a practical model.
So what I learned was that I had felt the call to write poems in response to very colorful, artful books like Nabokov’s as well as experimental poems and other uncategorizable types of writing. It turned out that I was compelled to write pretty abstractly too, that is, philosophically. Indeed even before I wanted to write novels I was highly impressed by my reading Plato’s Republic and began imitating Plato, doing pastiches of the Socratic dialogue, which I remember a friend at the time found very embarrassing. In the end it seemed the two poles of philosophical speculation and lyric poetry were to become a reciprocally reinforcing mechanism. The novel would have little place in that mechanism, and was a means to an end which almost ended me as it would end a lot of other friends who tried to write in college and their early twenties.
There is an annoying assumption built into our shared morality that we ought always to be ourselves. The notion of finding “one’s voice” has a metaphysical assumption behind it. The assumption is that each of us possesses something deep down which wishes to be free. This thing often gets called our true or “authentic” voice. It means that each of us has a certain style, a certain emotional range, a unique poetics buried down inside, and we just have to be brave enough to exercise it. This for me is untrue and very misleading, not just for me but for most people for whom writing has become a lifelong habit. On the contrary I have found that I need to get away from who I am and to heed the words of Arthur Rimbaud who said “The ‘I’ is someone else.” It is one thing to write AS THOUGH you have a voice all your own, it is another to act on the belief that your voice is the product of who you ALREADY ARE.
It’s my view that what is essential about each of us is something we ourselves create—“essence after existence,” as some philosopher (I believe Sartre) said. Therefore if you’re a young writer—even perhaps a student who doesn’t want to be a writer—and happen to have a particular accent or cadence that you happen to speak with because of how you were brought up and where, it’s not your moral or artistic responsibility to make your writing on the page have that inherited set of characteristics—as the voice ideologists believe—at least not while you are still young and inexperienced as a writer. The gift of being a young writer is the freedom to explore and experience the world, and leave your past, imposed ways of communicating behind you for the moment. Inheritance is not essence, though it is of course very important because it’s our foundation, from which there is ultimately no escape. One must reckon with their inheritance, which is like a great tradition, because all real writing comes from the deepest part of us, as Rilke states. It is our responsibility, then, to reckon with it, but also to turn it into something else, into art. To transform and alchemize, one must be very skilled and experienced and have experimented a great deal.
The tyrannical moral injunction to find your already existent voice—to be who you already are—is very likely the product of a larger macro-inheritance. The Calvinism which is our cultural inheritance whether we like it or not is something each of us must reckon with. All of us must find ways of transforming it, making it work for us, and ultimately surpassing it. It all began with a lie, a trap. It was the Calvinists who actually believed that in order to find out if one was predestined for Salvation, one would need to work as hard as possible and for as many hours each day as possible, and when finally dead would find out if he had been saved. And if he was saved it was because he was predestined to be saved. Max Weber tells us that it is this religious assumption based in a lie which enabled capitalism to come into being.
So for the Calvinist, believing that the truth about each individual was already out there didn’t lead to Salvation most likely, but to something else, a life individually unlived and a future that turned out to be a hell on earth for the many forced to labor in factories to make commodities to buy and sell and destroy the environment and make their bosses rich. The moral of the story: don’t act like the truth about you is already decided, already written. When you were born you didn’t talk like anyone at all: when you started to talk you imitated your caretakers, and then your community, and finally what you heard in movies and on TV.
Write yourself into existence. It is likely the case that after experimenting with idioms somewhat different or vastly different from your own that one day you’ll return home, to where you came from, except it will be different, and it will be better, the voice will be more true and more charismatic. Right now you have the gift of being like Odysseus who sailed the Aegean, moving from one adventure to the next, and finally returning home to his family. The idiom you arrive at or return to will be better than authentic, it will FEEL authentic to others. It will feel honest and solid. The best, most individual modes of literary expression were artificially created. It was Baltasar Gracián, I think, who said successful art conceals its artifice.
Long ago, when people were hotly debating whether free verse or traditional meter was better, the partisans of meter argued that the old-fashioned constraint of having to write a certain number of syllables per line with a certain rhyme in a particular place enabled the full release of one’s creative and imaginative potential. I believe experimenting with voice and style, perhaps as someone else, is analogous to what they meant. It helped me at least figure out how to write without a great deal of anxiety of influence because I was trying to imitate, not to BE anything, not even who I was imitating. I simply wanted to SEEM. In place of anxiety about whether any idol would approve, I now have a system of values which are my own because I arrived at them organically, out of my own experience writing and reflecting. Just as the meter a poet is forced to write in allows the poet to leave herself in order to become herself as a poet, so trying out other voices, like a child trying on costumes, helps me to figure out how to say what I need to. This has helped me in my poetry and in my scholarship, in the philosophical essays I write because I just need to, and even in this.
What else has worked for me?
On the topic of revision. As someone who immediately revises after turning out a draft—even after producing a single paragraph, or a single sentence—it can be nice after a couple of hours of toil, of tweaking, tinkering and generally ruining the nervous system—and more and more my sense of where I am in this great forest full of highly detailed trees which produced the paper I am writing on—to drink a little red wine (never drink too much, unless you happen to be very stout—and at least 21 years of age—and can keep your head after a full glass). For me, having a little wine helps me sometimes to regain my perspective. It lifts me out of the dark confusing forest with its many hallucinations and terrors, and brings me high into the air until I am like a falcon surveying a great country. This is one way of saying my perspective becomes objective again. You can also skip the wine, sleep, and revise the next day. I love to take a walk too.
Write, revise, write again—that is the main thing. And make your writing appear to have not been over-edited. The finished product ought to feel as spontaneous and natural as an inspired first draft, albeit without many of the structural issues that a first draft is likely to have.
And always read before writing, as the ancient Roman, Petronius, liked to do. It is for me reading a great deal before writing, even the night before, that fills up the dam with rain so it is nearly to the point of brimming over and I can’t help but start writing. Read at least ten pages of something which absorbs you before you write. It will activate the language center—the Logos which governs all language and logic in the universe. You’ll find the sentences begin to write themselves.
* * *
What advice to give writers?
It all depends.
For the sake of simplicity, there are three kinds of writing. There is the writing one has to do because someone asked them to do it, there is the writing one BELIEVES they would like to do, and then finally the writing one simply does because they must—for reasons which are personal and mysterious.
The second and third types would be special cases. Most of the essays on writing out there are for those who fall into the second and third. But unfortunately, people who desire to BE writers cannot be helped, at least as I see it, by the formulae of writers who have already figured out how to write their stuff. Every aspiring writer has to figure out for herself how to get the job done, but what I say here will perhaps help the aspiring writers know how to avoid certain traps, while helping people who have been asked to produce writing to do so without pain and too much “friction,” as the tech gurus say.
For whatever reason, some people have fallen in love with the idea of BEING a writer. Such a person will think a great deal about a future in which her pages are printed, bound and made available in stores in already finished form. This is a very exotic sort of self-imposed torture, I think—it’s one I would not wish on many people.
Yet I know how it feels, from experience. Though I am fundamentally not a novelist, I have briefly in the past believed I would like to be. Of course no one was asking me to produce a novel. The much bigger problem was that I did not have a strong desire to write novels. I was acting like someone who desired to have climbed Mount Everest yet hates hiking and climbing, let alone camping. I was someone who felt the need to write poetry (as well as cerebral essays), and therefore was probably more like a skateboarder, a gymnast, or even a ballet dancer—none of which are primarily about getting from Point A to Point Z. What I love to do involves compressing experience, feelings, and ideas into short moments and relatively small spaces—a kind of reduction alien to the novel. That is why the very notion of describing characters and places, objects in the world—trivial facts, as far as I was concerned—would make me shudder a bit, even if I admired certain novels.
While there are some who need to write novels, I was not one of them, and this naturally should have been a signal, but I also knew that I was young and could not be sure that my inclinations should be trusted. Instead of listening to my gut, I pushed myself a bit—which is not a bad thing.
Yet I was also deceiving myself by telling myself “this isn’t a novel, I am merely writing creatively”—which is a common technique among people of a particular temperament who have a NEED to write but wish to act on this need in a way that is more socially acceptable. “Novels are more legitimate than poems, so I should write them instead.” But I did not yet realize that this wasn’t possible. I should have known, because when I was entertaining the idea of writing a novel I actually felt like Paul Valéry, a French poet, who had a certain disdain for the type of sentences one has to make thousands of in order to produce a novel, or even a single chapter of a novel. I do not remember the particular, very banal example he used, but it was funny and vindicating, since it was so very typical of the sort of novelistic description that I was not interested in writing. I also hadn’t read Valéry’s views on the novel back then, but my gut was expressing its contempt, which is not the same as not loving mountain climbing. Indeed I had a little contempt for mountain climbing, so the desire to have climbed Everest was more likely a sublimated desire to have done something else. Climbing Everest was a metaphor which I mistook for reality.
Novels are also interesting because to do one one must be quite practical and down-to-earth—and, more importantly, very at home with the particulars of the world (something I, in certain ways, am not)—even if there is almost nothing practical about painstakingly crafting a hundred and fifty or more pages of realistic make-believe which no one even asked for. The novelist, it would seem, is a funny paradox—a sort of enigma.
On the other hand, I had a good reason for thinking I should write novels. Like an actor, I enjoyed doing voices that were different from my own, and was capable of saying things which I may not have thought or said in my own voice or character. In fact, this piece I am writing right now is itself a kind of imitation of the voice of numerous “how-to-write” essays I have read and recently come across while searching the internet for a piece to assign which would help you draft and revise your own first essays. I thought to myself, I can do this kind of thing, even if it comes off as a little self-indulgent.
In fact I can’t help but imitate styles and the type of writing I am reading, even if I don’t care for it. Even back in the day, when I really liked what I had just read, I had this need to see if I could do it almost as well. I had been misled by Nabokov, who had written a totally unique book with a highly charged, poetic prose which really amazed me. And it tricked me into believing I wished to create novels. The issue, again, was that I didn’t want to write novels—but I did sort of want to be Nabokov and to write like him. The problem was that there can only be one Nabokov, and rather than lightheartedly imitating something, I was in danger of forming an identity that would shackle me to this cruel master and prevent me from developing as I would have developed under a master who granted me a healthy sense of space and independence, while also serving as a practical model.
So what I learned was that I had felt the call to write poems in response to very colorful, artful books like Nabokov’s as well as experimental poems and other uncategorizable types of writing. It turned out that I was compelled to write pretty abstractly too, that is, philosophically. Indeed even before I wanted to write novels I was highly impressed by my reading Plato’s Republic and began imitating Plato, doing pastiches of the Socratic dialogue, which I remember a friend at the time found very embarrassing. In the end it seemed the two poles of philosophical speculation and lyric poetry were to become a reciprocally reinforcing mechanism. The novel would have little place in that mechanism, and was a means to an end which almost ended me as it would end a lot of other friends who tried to write in college and their early twenties.
There is an annoying assumption built into our shared morality that we ought always to be ourselves. The notion of finding “one’s voice” has a metaphysical assumption behind it. The assumption is that each of us possesses something deep down which wishes to be free. This thing often gets called our true or “authentic” voice. It means that each of us has a certain style, a certain emotional range, a unique poetics buried down inside, and we just have to be brave enough to exercise it. This for me is untrue and very misleading, not just for me but for most people for whom writing has become a lifelong habit. On the contrary I have found that I need to get away from who I am and to heed the words of Arthur Rimbaud who said “The ‘I’ is someone else.” It is one thing to write AS THOUGH you have a voice all your own, it is another to act on the belief that your voice is the product of who you ALREADY ARE.
It’s my view that what is essential about each of us is something we ourselves create—“essence after existence,” as some philosopher (I believe Sartre) said. Therefore if you’re a young writer—even perhaps a student who doesn’t want to be a writer—and happen to have a particular accent or cadence that you happen to speak with because of how you were brought up and where, it’s not your moral or artistic responsibility to make your writing on the page have that inherited set of characteristics—as the voice ideologists believe—at least not while you are still young and inexperienced as a writer. The gift of being a young writer is the freedom to explore and experience the world, and leave your past, imposed ways of communicating behind you for the moment. Inheritance is not essence, though it is of course very important because it’s our foundation, from which there is ultimately no escape. One must reckon with their inheritance, which is like a great tradition, because all real writing comes from the deepest part of us, as Rilke states. It is our responsibility, then, to reckon with it, but also to turn it into something else, into art. To transform and alchemize, one must be very skilled and experienced and have experimented a great deal.
The tyrannical moral injunction to find your already existent voice—to be who you already are—is very likely the product of a larger macro-inheritance. The Calvinism which is our cultural inheritance whether we like it or not is something each of us must reckon with. All of us must find ways of transforming it, making it work for us, and ultimately surpassing it. It all began with a lie, a trap. It was the Calvinists who actually believed that in order to find out if one was predestined for Salvation, one would need to work as hard as possible and for as many hours each day as possible, and when finally dead would find out if he had been saved. And if he was saved it was because he was predestined to be saved. Max Weber tells us that it is this religious assumption based in a lie which enabled capitalism to come into being.
So for the Calvinist, believing that the truth about each individual was already out there didn’t lead to Salvation most likely, but to something else, a life individually unlived and a future that turned out to be a hell on earth for the many forced to labor in factories to make commodities to buy and sell and destroy the environment and make their bosses rich. The moral of the story: don’t act like the truth about you is already decided, already written. When you were born you didn’t talk like anyone at all: when you started to talk you imitated your caretakers, and then your community, and finally what you heard in movies and on TV.
Write yourself into existence. It is likely the case that after experimenting with idioms somewhat different or vastly different from your own that one day you’ll return home, to where you came from, except it will be different, and it will be better, the voice will be more true and more charismatic. Right now you have the gift of being like Odysseus who sailed the Aegean, moving from one adventure to the next, and finally returning home to his family. The idiom you arrive at or return to will be better than authentic, it will FEEL authentic to others. It will feel honest and solid. The best, most individual modes of literary expression were artificially created. It was Baltasar Gracián, I think, who said successful art conceals its artifice.
Long ago, when people were hotly debating whether free verse or traditional meter was better, the partisans of meter argued that the old-fashioned constraint of having to write a certain number of syllables per line with a certain rhyme in a particular place enabled the full release of one’s creative and imaginative potential. I believe experimenting with voice and style, perhaps as someone else, is analogous to what they meant. It helped me at least figure out how to write without a great deal of anxiety of influence because I was trying to imitate, not to BE anything, not even who I was imitating. I simply wanted to SEEM. In place of anxiety about whether any idol would approve, I now have a system of values which are my own because I arrived at them organically, out of my own experience writing and reflecting. Just as the meter a poet is forced to write in allows the poet to leave herself in order to become herself as a poet, so trying out other voices, like a child trying on costumes, helps me to figure out how to say what I need to. This has helped me in my poetry and in my scholarship, in the philosophical essays I write because I just need to, and even in this.
What else has worked for me?
On the topic of revision. As someone who immediately revises after turning out a draft—even after producing a single paragraph, or a single sentence—it can be nice after a couple of hours of toil, of tweaking, tinkering and generally ruining the nervous system—and more and more my sense of where I am in this great forest full of highly detailed trees which produced the paper I am writing on—to drink a little red wine (never drink too much, unless you happen to be very stout—and at least 21 years of age—and can keep your head after a full glass). For me, having a little wine helps me sometimes to regain my perspective. It lifts me out of the dark confusing forest with its many hallucinations and terrors, and brings me high into the air until I am like a falcon surveying a great country. This is one way of saying my perspective becomes objective again. You can also skip the wine, sleep, and revise the next day. I love to take a walk too.
Write, revise, write again—that is the main thing. And make your writing appear to have not been over-edited. The finished product ought to feel as spontaneous and natural as an inspired first draft, albeit without many of the structural issues that a first draft is likely to have.
And always read before writing, as the ancient Roman, Petronius, liked to do. It is for me reading a great deal before writing, even the night before, that fills up the dam with rain so it is nearly to the point of brimming over and I can’t help but start writing. Read at least ten pages of something which absorbs you before you write. It will activate the language center—the Logos which governs all language and logic in the universe. You’ll find the sentences begin to write themselves.
* * *
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Daniel
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Nov 27, 2023 07:43PM
Very useful sharing and advice. Thank you!
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Love this elegantly distilled wisdom <3 this reads like a future classic.
