Reading without stealing

Trying not to become a bad copy of your favourite writer.

Did I mention I’m doing an MA in creative writing? Oh, just the 48 times? Well, I’m now on the final stretch, working on my dissertation, so brace yourself for a few more months of mentions. It’ll be done and dusted in September.

(By the way: I often hear from friends and also listeners of the podcast who are wondering whether they should do an MA in creative writing. I’m going to tackle this question in an upcoming newsletter, so if you have any specific questions you’d like me to answer, please comment on this post.)

For my dissertation at Birkbeck, I have to submit 15,000 words of creative writing and a 3,000 word preface. This is what the course handbook says:

Note on preface: this is a hybrid form of literary essay/critical self-assessment. Students should discuss lucidly the development of their writing in terms of the literary influences upon it, and describe the personal journey involved in making a work of fiction over the course of the programme. You can discuss an aspect of your research, or the development of your technique but it requires some sense of your journey as a reader too and requires a bibliography of at least six influencing texts.

The creative writing part is in hand, but the preface is really worrying me. I’m not sure which texts have influenced me, or whether I’ve been influenced enough, or too much. I’m not sure I’m that aware of what I’m doing while I’m writing – but it’s probably not a good idea to put that in the preface.

I need to be able to refer cogently to six texts by the time I hand this thing in in September, so I’ve started rereading novels that I think may have influenced my writing style and the content of what I’m doing. While it’s lovely to reread books that I enjoyed, I’m not enthusiastic about doing it right now, while I’m also trying to write. It’s intimidating and distracting, like going into a Michelin-starred kitchen at lunchtime and trying to prepare my own lunch of cheese-and-crisps-sandwich in the corner.

Writers often say that they avoid reading novels while they’re working on one themselves, because they don’t want to absorb too much of another writer’s style or accidentally pinch something. It’s easy to do, especially when you’re very engaged in whatever you’re reading. When I read William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, which is a fictional diary of one man from adolescence to old age, I found that my own journal started to sound like it had also been written by Logan Mountstuart. Instead of writing in my usual neurotic millennial way, I was suddenly identifying people by their full names and constructing grand sentences that more elaborately showcased my vocabulary. Journals are always embarrassing, even though they’re private – but this was particularly embarrassing.

Apparently it was Wallace Notestein, an English professor at Yale University in the 1920s, who coined the expression, ‘If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research.’ I don’t mention this because I think copying is OK, at all – but there’s a serious truth underneath it, which is that we learn everything we do as writers by reading. The idea of the preface part of the dissertation, I assume, is to encourage self-awareness of your own literary heritage: the writers whose work has gone into the blender of your brain (along with your experiences, your travels, the movies you love and the people you know). They’ve all contributed in a small way to you producing something that’s, in some sense, ‘original’.

In making the podcast, I’ve been interested to learn that some writers keep favourite books on or near their desk for inspiration. Emma Jane Unsworth is one of them. Here’s a slightly condensed version of what she said when I asked at what point she found her distinctive literary voice:

Probably Animals was the point. And I think that was a mixture of confidence, and what I’d read and what I was knowing was giving me good nourishment as a writer – the books that I’d started to choose, that I still keep around, that are like my touch stones. They’re between five and ten books that I’ve gathered, and they all give me that little boost of a reminder as to what my style is and what I’m trying to achieve, which is just trying to write good sentences, and trying to be entertaining, and try and do something new with the page.

I asked her what those books are, and she mentioned titles by Lorrie Moore, Glen Duncan and Sarah Hall, and then The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis:

I just dip in and out of that – sometimes I just read a few sentences. It’s not because I want to write like Martin Amis, but there’s something about the liveliness of his prose. There’s something about the riot of it that inspires me to be riotous and lively in my own way. It gives me an injection of adrenaline, looking at that. I literally just dip… and continue.

(Here’s Emma’s full episode of In Writing – she was very warm, funny and honest.)

So I suppose it’s OK to have your favourite authors on standby – and while it still makes me nervous to be rereading their books while I attempt to do my own work, maybe it’s good to remind me what I’m aiming for. As the novelist Zoë Heller wrote in a piece about this for the New York Times, ‘I’m not entirely convinced that having another author’s style rub off on mine would be such a terrible thing.’

What about you? What have you read that rubbed off on your writing?

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I no longer have Covid, and the audio version of this newsletter is back. If you’d rather listen to me than read me, you can get the audio version delivered to your favourite podcast app each week – it’s usually about five minutes long, which is a good length for listening while brushing your teeth in the morning, or making a coffee, or maybe taking the dog to do its business (I don’t know, I don’t have a dog).

To listen to the audio version you’ll need a paid subscription, which costs £4 a month or £40 a year – which, I hope, is worthwhile to support the body of work that now makes up In Writing in its various forms. Thank you to everyone who’s already made that leap – it makes a big difference to me.

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No Creative Club this weekend, but the inaugural In Writing Creative Hour will take place on Sunday 26 June at 10am, again for paid subscribers. I’ll send out more details next Thursday.

Good luck with your writing this week.