On Influence, Imitation and Finding Your Voice
Every artist starts by copying the ones they love. Originality isn't the opposite of influence — it's what's left over after you've absorbed it.
Every artist starts by copying the ones they love. Originality isn't the opposite of influence — it's what's left over after you've absorbed it.
The fear that stops everyone
Talk to anyone who wants to make something and isn't, and somewhere in the reasons you'll find a fear of being derivative. 'It's already been done.' 'I'd just be copying.' 'I don't have anything original to say.' This fear stops more would-be creators than any lack of skill, and it rests on a complete misunderstanding of how originality actually works — a misunderstanding that the artists they admire would find baffling.
Because every artist you love started by copying. Van Gogh copied Millet's peasants and Japanese prints, obsessively, for years. Musicians learn by playing other people's songs note for note. Writers begin by imitating the authors who lit them up. This isn't a shameful secret to be hidden on the way to 'real' originality. It's the training. Imitation is how you load the raw material of a voice into yourself in the first place.
Art is theft.
Originality is imperfect memory
Here's the mechanism nobody explains. You don't find your voice by avoiding influence; you find it by having so many influences that they blur. Copy one artist and you're a copy. Absorb fifty, badly and incompletely, and what comes out the other side — filtered through your particular memory, taste and limitations — is something none of them made. Your voice is the sum of everything you loved, imperfectly remembered. The imperfection is the originality.
This is why the advice 'be original' is useless and the advice 'have great taste and steal widely' actually works. The wider and more varied your influences, the less any single one shows through, and the more the combination becomes unmistakably yours. The artists who seem most original are usually the ones who absorbed the most, from the most places, and digested it so thoroughly you can no longer see the seams.
Steal the right things
There's a difference, of course, between learning from and lifting wholesale. The point isn't to clone someone's surface — their exact style, their signature move — and pass it off. It's to study what makes the work good underneath, to ask why it works, and to take the principle rather than the photocopy. Steal the thinking, not the thing. Take what resonates so deeply you can't help it, and let it merge with everything else you've taken.
And the things worth stealing aren't only the famous masterpieces. Take from a turn of phrase a stranger used, the structure of a film, the color of a sunset, a solution from a completely unrelated field. The broadest, most omnivorous thieves make the most original work, because their stew has the most ingredients. Carry a notebook. Collect what moves you. You're not being unoriginal; you're gathering the parts your voice will eventually be built from.
We are what we repeatedly admire.
Make the imperfect copy
So if the fear of being derivative has been holding you back, here is your permission slip: start by copying the people you love. Make the imperfect imitation. Then make another, of someone else. Then a third. Somewhere in the overlap and the errors, your own voice is quietly assembling itself, and one day you'll make something that sounds like you and no one else — built, as every voice is, from borrowed parts.
Originality was never the opposite of influence. It's what's left over after you've absorbed enough of it. Go love things deeply, take what moves you, and let it become you. That's not cheating. That's the whole craft.
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