Ever since I read Steal Like an Artist, I keep coming across passages in other books, mostly by authors, which embody the same basic premise: distilling inspiration for your own work out of everything you take in. It reinforces my own reaction to the “steal like an artist” idea: to me it wasn’t so much a revolutionary concept as it was a validation of something authors and artists do by nature, whether they realize it or not. It put a name to something that I realized was entirely natural to me. Now I see that many other authors of all varieties, without putting the same name to it, viewed inspiration in the same way. I connected one of the best passages with Steal Like an Artist in retrospect: this awesome quote by Eugene Rhodes that I’d shared before. Then there’s this from Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker:
It is interesting to rake into one’s mind and discover, if one can, what were the combined sources of power on which one, consciously or unconsciously, drew while endeavoring to express an idea in writing…What is important, and not always understood in these days, is that a reminiscent passage…is intended to recall to the reader all the associated passages and so put him in touch with the sources of power behind and beyond the writer. The demand for “originality”—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time. The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion and reflection are directed.
And then here is Madeleine L’Engle in A Circle of Quiet:
A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn’t diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. When I hear a superb pianist, I can’t wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of any artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else.
Personally, I find this point of view tremendously freeing: being able to view everything you take in—books, films, music, et cetera—as an incredibly rich, flowing source of inspiration to draw from, rather than a collection of things you admire but must struggle not to imitate too much. It’s also encouraging to realize that the artists you yourself admire also drew on the flowing source of inspiration created by the artists who came before them. Looking at it this way, any author can see themselves as following in a great literary tradition, whether it was something they consciously tried to do or not.
