I’ve had a quote on my desk for about ten years. So long that I’m not even sure where I originally found it. The quote is:

“William Faulkner imitated Shakespeare and Herman Melville. Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison imitated Faulkner. Ernest Hemingway imitated Anton Chekhov. Raymond Carver imitated Hemingway.  Jack Kerouac imitated Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe.  Allen Ginsberg imitated Walt Whitman and William Blake.”

The lesson here is that every writer—every artist of every sort—learns from those who came before them by initially copying their style in order to find the things they liked and didn’t like and, as a result, find their own voice in the process.  The same holds true for today’s writers as much as it did for those who are already considered legends.  Richard Ford, author of ‘The Sportswriter,’ was influenced by Raymond Carver and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  J.M. Coetzee, author of ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ was influenced by Ford Maddox Ford.  Nick Cole, author of the Wasteland Series, was influenced by Hemingway.

Every author you speak to probably has a similar influence(s). My own are two I mentioned above: Ford and Coetzee. The interesting thing is tracing the lineage of your influence. For example, while I consider myself to be a blend of Ford and Coetzee, if I trace their own influences back one step, I’m actually a blend of Carver, Emerson, and Maddox Ford.

For all practical purposes, this lineage has no implication other than it’s extremely interesting. If you’re a writer, how far back can you trace the lineage of your own writing influences?  And if you have dreams of one day becoming a writer, take comfort in knowing that the greats and those who aim to be great learned how to write the same way as you: by learning from those whose books they enjoyed and whose writing completely captured them.

 

Want to read my previous blog posts? You can find them all right here.