Larry M. Coleman

Nihil sub sōle novum: there is nothing new under the sun.

It’s in Latin, so you know it’s old. Despite that 1500+ year sepia tone of antiquity, ironically enough, it wasn’t even new then: it’s the Latin form of Ecclesiastes 1:9, which was itself a translation of an even older form.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s been rolling since before any of us were born.

When you first sit down to write something new, you may put a lot of pressure on yourself to create something new and original, something so different that the world has never seen its like. Don’t put that burden on your own shoulders because, when it’s done (which it never will be if you’re too weighed down with the anvil of originality), you won’t. And that’s okay.

Hard fields (science, academia, etc.) build their pyramid on the blocks of those who have come before them. It’s important to know whether those sources are reputable so the building is not built with crumbling blocks.

Soft fields such as art and music are not a pyramid of knowledge; they are a pool of ideas and techniques, and the weakening of one block does not affect the stability of the rest of the construction. Art grows outward while knowledge grows upward, so it’s an honored tradition—even an implied expectation, as Picasso (may have) said, “Bad artists borrow; great artists steal”—to incorporate and extend the ideas of others into new works. In fact, art historians delight in finding these “borrowings” the way oenophiles enjoy detecting a slight taste of terroir or oak in wine. It’s a cultural marker, and you’re part of that culture.

This needs some more explanation, because it’s not a license to rip off others. To get a little deeper, I unfortunately have to quote one of the (if not the) most overrated poet of the twentieth century. It took Bob Dylan to knock him off the top of the perch of “Biggest Joke Award the Nobel Prize Committee Ever Gave”:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

—Thomas Insufferable Stearns Eliot

Am I saying you should go out and imitate, borrow, steal, mimic, or or plunder like a Viking as you write? I am not. What I am saying, though, is don’t worry about trying to come up with an original plot just out of thin air. Even Shakespeare cribbed from others.

Just write. You’ll be original just by being you. If you need to start by “borrowing” the style of an author you like, that’s okay. You’ll find your own by writing yourself into it. If you don’t eventually, you’re writing fanfic. That’s fine, too, as long as it’s what you intend to do.

If it’s not, ask yourself what it is you bring to what you’re writing about that no one else does. Let yourself put that on the table. Writing is the most personal thing you can do, at least if you’re doing it right. That personality is what keeps people talking about you even if you’re an incoherent bore like T. S. Eliot absolutely brilliant.

I started out by intentionally borrowing the style of one of my favorite authors. Even at the start, that loan was only intended to be the training wheels I needed to get the bike rolling down the sidewalk. Those came off more quickly than I’d expected, and by three-quarters of the way through my first book I already had some idea of what my voice and style would look like when it was fully formed.

When people pick up something I write, I want them to know even without looking at the cover that they’re reading Coleman. I’ve done that to the point that people would say, “Oh, I love reading him!” or, “Ick. I hate his stuff.” (Freedom of any kind only works if it goes both ways.)

But I didn’t start that way. Paradoxically, I gave myself the freedom to find out who I was as a writer by starting off writing like someone else. If the sticking point keeping you from writing is being afraid of not being original, give yourself the same freedom.