When I started writing, I wanted to be exactly
like the artists I admired. They included the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
and oddly enough, the French filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, who was not a writer,
but whose attitude and politics I admired. So I imitated them at first. When I got to college, the poets my literature professors promoted as role
models were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. There are still many things I admire
about those two, as much as I find their politics extremely distasteful. I especially
admire their multilingual and international approach to literature, and the
originality of their diction. When I’m trying to get my eight-year-old son into
his shoes and jacket and out the door, I still find myself saying out loud these lines from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
As soon as I started to meet people my age who
also hoped to be writers, I wanted to write like my junior-year-in-college
roommate and fellow poet, who admired André Breton and the French surrealists.
Surrealism continues to be a lighthouse for me, even though my acid-head
roommate ended up becoming a minister, but that’s another story.
In general, the trick is not to write like the
authors you admire, but to find the way that you, personally, were meant to
write.
There’s a famous story about the 18th
century Hasidic leader, Rabbi Zusya. Hasidism is the mystical branch of
Judaism. The story goes like this:
Once, the great religious leader Rabbi Zusya went
to speak to his followers. His eyes were red with tears, and his face was pale
with fear.
“Zusya, you look terrified. What's the
matter?” asked one of his followers.
“The other day, I had a vision,” Zusya
responded. “I learned the question that the angels will one day ask me about my
life.”
His followers were puzzled. “Zusya,
you’re pious, scholarly, and humble. You’ve helped so many of us. What question
could you be afraid of?”
Zusya turned his gaze to heaven. “I’ve
learned that the angels won’t ask me, ‘Why weren’t you more like Moses, leading
your people out of slavery?’ The angels won’t ask me, ‘Why weren’t you more
like Joshua, leading your people into the promised land?’ The angels will say
to me, ‘Zusya, there was only one thing that no power in heaven or on earth
could have prevented you from becoming.’ They’ll say, ‘Zusya, why weren’t you
more like Zusya?’”
Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
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