A child cannot speak. It exists before language, and must, through the process of experience, come to master language. The means which it does this is at first through mimicry. A child replicates speech it hears, until eventually that speech evolves into something natural and fully formed. So called original.
Writing, by means of its nature--and I include here all other mediums of Art concurrently--is a form of personal speech, an extension of the speech formed for use in everyday life, though less practically communicable. It is a diverse language, a dialect in the history of human creation, which must too develop through the psychological stages of our own growth.
With this in mind, it’s absurd to expect a toddler to speak a word let alone a sentence. Imagine! how strange such a phenomenon would be. So, instead, we must expect a toddler to study, to immerse, to mimic, and eventually evolve a speech at first derivative and later fully developed.
I have, in fact, spoken before on the fallacy of origination (in the realm of philosophy), for indeed we live in a hyper-synthetic world and to own anything as fully original--that is the origin of something--would be absurd. Look at the unique (which we often mislabel as original). It is only unique when judged against that which it is reacting too, and thus it can only exist as a product of this reaxion. In this dialectic, the ‘normal’ is more original--that is serving as the origin of--than the ‘unique’. For this reason alone, the term original should be entirely discontinued.
But let us return to the realm of the Arts where our exploration began. We, writers, artists and the like, are all infants. We begin our careers, whether that be in an academic fashion or through grass-roots development, as children. We cannot yet speak, for though we have read (in all likely scenarios) we have not developed according to the model presented to us by natural phenomena. We must follow the steps of the Chomsky LAD before our period of maturation ceases--though it should be understood this is not measured in chronology or age but rather as a ferocity of spirit, a dulling of the sense that often accompanies aging but does not serve as a direct analogue.
This is where the corrosive culture emerges. In the postmodern, in the Neu, a flurry of voices is present in a gyre of ideas. There is a lens to understand any walk of life, a worldview consistent to categorise every box and experience. And though, in many ways, this has facilitated an age of unprecedented liberty (there is a strong argument to be made against this as merely an advertisal semantic claim in a separate work) it has also facilitated an unhealthy perspective in the public sphere.
Anyone can be an Artist. Indeed, it is true, and we all make Arts everyday whether consciously or not. But not everyone SHOULD be an Artist, and that is the delineation. There is, as mentioned before, an invisible passion which must excite your loins, the seed of your soul, before you should consider taking such a path. Because a life of Art without passion is a life of adultery without romance; though each may both reach a desired end, the path to get there will be one of great individual suffering and will likely not yield the ripest fruits.
Let us suppose you have introspected, felt that invisible aspect within your breast, and now you see fit to set out on the path of artistic life. There are plenty of resources to guide you, university programs, online courses, advice from family and friends (I could continue naming these with fear this would develop into the rhythm of It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year). Instead, I make the bold claim that all of these are frivolous pursuits--with the caveat that they can serve useful and subsidiary experiences in a variety of cases.
There is only one path to speaking, and though you can journey differently and cobble together the appearance of coherent speech, it will never be the fully nourished product of the journey. No half-hearted attempt could ever yield a Vergil, Goethe or Shakespeare.
As seen in history, the progression is natural. An apprentice is born when one of the right temperament, that beautifully quizzical soul, approaches a master and follows in those footsteps, first through observation then through reduplication--just as the child formed its speech.
Read all the old masters, and not just the contemporary or the popular. If, again, you wish only to write as a means to ease a financial burden or seek some form of fame--both of which exclude themselves from the category of Art based on their association with ulteriors--then a diet of contemporary prose is fine. If this is your aim, you don’t wish to be a writer, you wish to be an author (a precisely differentiated term). There are plenty of authors in this world, and the economic and bureaucratic structures of the world need them to funxion, but there are very few writers, those who develop speech, all of their own, and born of the seed of the past.
So, to those writers, to those aspiring apprentices seeking out a master, read the old guard, the canon. You needn’t enjoy everything you read--after all, taste and aesthetics, though having basis in ‘objective’ judgement, are merely a personal endeavour. Study closely the internalised rhythm and rhyme of each individual word or phrase, the craftsmanship and the artifice. Watch the master work behind the curtain of the workshop, watch the masterpiece get made (I know I use this term historically inaccurately, forgive me this).
And breathe in wide. No great writer in history has been a specialist, someone concerned only with a single ‘scientific lens’ or one work and its supplementary literature. A greater scope will allow for a richer vocabulary later on.
Remember too not to be of ill-humour. Most times were not so different from today. The ‘great’ literature of the past is nothing more than the smut of the now. It is only in the form, and the presentation of that artistic spark for which these pieces rise up against history.
I too, though I offer this advice with seeming authority, am only an apprentice. So, understand, I say all this to not only share my thoughts but also my lessons learnt along the way.
Once you have listened, truly listened, gone through the texts thoroughly and come to understand, then you can begin to mimic, to move on to a rough form of speech. This is simple, exactly as the child does. Recreate the speech, the language, the words, the rhythm, the structure. Continue this until it becomes internalised. If, for instance, while writing a poem, you feel the need to count the syllables to achieve a rhyme--even in those complicated forms such as Sonnet or the old classical ways--you must return to pure mimicry, you are not ready to venture out into the world, as this should be a spontaneous expression of the fire within. Mind you, this does not apply to editing. All great writers must edit, but rather to the initial burst of writing which emerges.
The final stage, of course, is that of personal development, the so called birth of the original voice--a linguistic mouthful considering it amounts to the origin of the origin.
And here is the argument. I hear already the people say, if you proceed in such a way the voice which emerges, that sacred personal speech, will be nothing more than a cobbled together amalgamation of all that has come before, and, perhaps, given a certain attachment to a coterie of writers, a direct reflexion of inspiration. And to this, I say: ha!
Which writer in history is not the sum total of inspiration? Just as all philosophers reciprocate, reinterpret and synthesise ideas, writers, as the less (or perhaps more) adept philosophers merely reconstruct the remnants of the past. Dante and Milton are nothing without the Bible (not to mention nearly the whole corpus of Western literature). Without the Greek plays of antiquity, there would be no Hölderlin, Vergil, Nietzsche or Joyce. And even looking back into the past, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus only adapted the fancies heard on folk hills or scenes witnessed in the agora.
We are all, essentially, cheap and petty thieves. It is not only a race to the goal, who can first repurpose an idea, but also a competition of competency because not every reimagining will yield the same harvest as another, and this difference can largely be understood as a cultivation of each writer’s personal language.
Do not be an origin, be a destination. Bring the reader along on the voyage of your development, where they might marvel at the exhibits you’ve laid along the way. It is likely, if they are a worthy reader, they have journeyed there too, found themselves stray in the woods or locked out of the heaven built by God. We all share the history, not only of experience, but of language. If you are to insist on originality in literature, you must first invent a language--and not just a constructed form, but one entirely unconnected with human attempts. Only then could a work originate anything. But even then, returning to the dialectic, you have defined your uniqueness against that which is not-unique, and in doing so, have laid a clear path back to the origin. A rebelling against.
Like a candle in the night, briefly chasing out the dark, when time comes you feel prepared, snuff it out and write until morning all that you have learnt along the way.
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