Who Wants to Listen to Disposable Music? from James W. Ziskin

Has an outside influence ever crept into your writing?

Of course outside influences have found their way into my work.

It’s impossible for writers to avoid it. And, in fact, if they somehow managed to shut out the world and all its influences, I doubt their writing would be of any interest to us. Our ideas and style are surely shaped by everything we hear, see, and read. 

Take language, for instance. I don’t write books and stories in my own idiolect, after all. I use a more-or-less standard English, a flavor hundreds of millions of speakers share, to greater or lesser degrees, depending on experience, age, and provenance. To put it differently, speaking or writing, I grind away somewhere inside the immense, ever-roiling cloud we recognize as English. Despite any creative urges I may have to fiddle with our mutually comprehensible language, I tend to color inside the lines. Which means I, like anyone else, am influenced by everyone’s language around me. I absorb it, digest it, and use it.

The same is true for books I read. But if this week’s question is do I notice other writers’ influence in my own work, I would answer “not specifically.” I don’t copy or imitate other authors, but I can’t have helped but grow and learn at the knee of every one I’ve read. Techniques, tricks, turns of phrase, ideas, and emotions. Every word is a lesson, positive or negative, if we’re paying attention that is. Think of a piano. It has eighty-eight keys. All composers have the same eighty-eight notes at their disposal. It’s how they arrange them, the tempi they choose, the rhythms they tinker with that makes the music their own. If the result is too familiar, too derivative, it won’t succeed, at least not for long. Who wants to listen to disposable music? The same is true in writing. We all have language and shared cultural experiences in our toolbox. It’s how writers fashion the words and ideas, in their own voice and in their own private worldview, that sets their stories apart. It’s what makes it worth writing—and reading—at all.

My advice—for what little it’s worth—is to let the world and all its vast multiplicity of experience wash over you. Books, television, film, music, history, and language. Study them, learn from them, and use them in your own idiosyncratic way. Make them yours. Then your words just might creep into our shared consciousness and influence other writers.