There are all sorts of authors I pretend have influenced me: Dostoevsky (Notes From the Underground), Catullus, Prus (Lalka), T.S. Eliot (Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Little Gidding), Lydia Davis, Cao Xueqin and Saiichi Maruya (Singular Rebellion) just to name a few. If I’m being honest though, I’m pretty sure there’s no detectable trace of any of them in anything I’ve written.
A competent visual artist, someone who went to school for it and dares call themself a professional, should probably be able to do a decent imitation of any distinctive artist’s style. They don’t need to be able to make a forgery that would go undetected by professional appraisers — but, with enough time and preparation, they should be able to make something that you can squint at and think “that looks like a Van Gogh!” all the while knowing that it is in fact not a Van Gogh.
I think this is also a reasonable requirement for a “professional writer.” If you’re writing stories with all sorts of characters speaking in their own voices, shouldn’t you also be able to write prose that recalls certain distinctive writers? Or at least the ones whom you’ve read over and over? I’ve never been able to do this — not on demand at least. Which is one of the many reasons why I feel like I should be careful about referring to myself as a writer.
It’s easier for me to be influenced by others when writing about ideas. Perhaps this comes from my background in “mathematical thinking.” In mathematics, you essentially proceed by assuming certain hypotheses are true and then seeing what results from them. Whether or not such hypotheses are actually possible is another question — typically one would just show that these hypotheses are satisfied when some more basic set of conditions exist, which in turn can be implied from some other conditions, until you reach basic axioms, which again are just assumed to be true for convenience. All mathematical statements are conditional — it’s the relationship between these statements that form “mathematical knowledge.”
If you apply such mental habits to “the real world”, it’s easy to find yourself saying all sorts of ridiculous things just to see what conclusions might follow, or how they might be related to truths that seem to rest on firmer ground. So when I encounter people expounding one idea or another that I find interesting, I often find myself taking it as my own, regardless of whether or not I think there’s any chance of it containing truth. I’m very open to ideas. One’s ideas/politics/religious beliefs don’t feel like an essential component of identity to me. Sometimes I gaze out at the world, contemplating it under the assumption that I and all other sentient life forms are stuck in a cycle of reincarnation that can only end by becoming Buddhas or Arhats. Other times I’m certain that the Christian God is real, and that I will be damned to hell after my death and spend the rest of eternity there due to my lack of faith. I can assume hypotheses, but I can’t have real faith, so this is the inevitable logical conclusion whenever I assume mainstream Protestant Christian doctrine as true.
It’s not that I can believe in anything, I just don’t find it difficult to leap between different contradictory ideas and belief systems. It doesn’t bother me all that much when these contradict. The contradictions feel like an opportunity to reveal more about the assumptions behind these world views.
Yet I can’t seem to be so open to “style,” the main dimension of influence you focused on in your letter. I wonder why? I can’t get outside of my own “non-style” and see it as just one option among many. I’m trapped in my own habits — not a style I consciously cultivated, but which I happened to just find myself in — the same way one gets trapped in the religion they were born into or political ideals of the nation they come from.
A person is their voice — this is how I often feel. We are determined by the way we say things, not the content of what we say. The paradox of all this is that when I read others, it’s almost always their “voice” that captures my attention. So this puts me in a predicament: that which I care about most is precisely what I find most difficult to practice and improve.
As I said, I find it easy to assume certain ideas are true and just roll with them. I said this might have been due to studying mathematics, in which case all the math textbooks I read to learn proof writing could be said to have been a "literary influence." Though now that I’ve thought about this a little more, I suspect this actually all goes back to Wang Xiaobo, whom I read long before I ever started studying math seriously. At the beginning of Golden Age, Chen Qingyang comes down a mountain looking for the narrator Wang 2, hoping he'll help clear her name from accusations of adultery. Instead he constructs some convoluted argument concluding that she should just try actually committing adultery. In Chinese, this passage is filled with the word 假如, a conjunction used for constructing hypotheticals, meaning something like "supposing that." I immediately fell in love with that word. I started saying 假如 constantly in Chinese, which I'm sure made me sound quite ridiculous. I wanted to learn to create my own convoluted arguments. This was a major factor in choosing to study mathematics.
I think this illustrates how literary influence often works for me. A few sentences, none essential to the plot of the story, opened my eyes to new possibilities and got me seeking something: the logic of absurdity. It's like The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim — I felt the vaguest suggestion of some sublimity, and it was that which I tried to embody, both in my writing and in my real life. Certain ideas are powerful enough to reorient the structure of the mind, changing completely how it interprets both new and old ideas. That’s what my influences ultimately amount to.
When you say you learned to write by imitation, I’m curious, on a more concrete level, how you went about that? Let’s take Tim Rogers as our example, since you conveniently listed three qualities of his writing that felt important to you. Back when you actually were “blatantly ripping him off”, were you conscious enough of these three characteristics that you could have named them like this? Or is this something you’ve only worked out now, in retrospect? I’m not sure I could perform such a clear analysis of the style of authors I like, in part because I would be scared to do so.
Anyway, looking at your list, the first two, short sentences and mundane details, seem simple enough to imitate. All one has to do is pay attention to the mundane details in one’s own life and remember enough of them to come home and write them down in sequences of single clause sentences. However, your third point is the exact sort of thing I’ve struggled to “implement” when trying to imitate one author or another. A “poetical conclusion” feels like something that is given to you, not something that one can create themself.
Did the poetical conclusion become a requirement in your mind for a piece of writing to qualify an essay, as opposed to just an unfinished heap of words? Would you not publish something unless you could find the poetical conclusion for it? Would you force completely unsuitable conclusions onto your essays to just make them feel complete? Or was it simply a matter of writing conclusions in the same “form” as Tim Rogers? That is, what did it mean for your own writing to feel poetic? Was it a different sort of requirement from what made Tim Rogers’ writing feel poetic to you?
I of course imitated Tim Rogers too (as we have discussed before). He was probably the last author I’ve ever been able to consciously imitate. If I were to make a list mirroring yours of the three most essential elements of his style, it would be something like this:
Number 2 in particular is what resonated with teenage me: suddenly I felt like I found a way to turn all my effeminacy and awkwardness into a superpower! Numbers 1 and 3 then felt like essential tools to make number 2 work. What made this feel even more mind-blowing to me was what this Extreme Coolness was weaponized for: to convince lonely repressed people (usually women) to “confess” to him their deepest darkest secrets, secrets they couldn’t tell anyone else. This idea that we have a public outer self that we show to society and a true inner self that we keep hidden was certainly something I’d encountered many times in other media, but it was Tim Rogers’ writing that got me to think about this a lot. Suddenly I felt like I had an explanation for why I felt so lonely, even when I had had a decent number of friends in school: I was only seeing their surface level public selves — I hadn’t earned the right to see their “true selves.” The desire to see that “true self” turned into a kind of all-consuming mission, both in my real life and in my writing.
For reference, I’m sending you (and only you) my own Tim Rogers imitation that I wrote for a creative writing class when I was 18, that in retrospect was clearly built on these three principles and the binary between the hidden and public self. Just like you with your essays, I got a huge amount of praise for it. My teacher told me “No matter what you do, you have to keep on writing.” It made me feel like a fraud. Almost immediately, I vowed never to write like him again. Ever since I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to escape this imaginary copy of him living in the darkest corners of my mind. In one of his essays he wrote about his fancy office at a Japanese game company with toilets that had seat warmers and bidets and a cleaning lady who was in there constantly, making sure that no one ever saw any filth. I read that in bed, having recently dropped out of high school, and thought “I want to work in an office like that.” Then, long after I forgot I ever wanted that, I realized just the other morning that now I am working at a Chinese game company in an office where half the toilets have bidets and seat warmers and the cleaning lady is usually but not always there, scrubbing away. Even if I’m not plagiarizing his style anymore, I still can’t help but feel like I plagiarized his life, creating some weird discount brand version of it — and my life influences (limits?) the kinds of things I write. The desires of 18-year-old me were just too powerful: they sowed seeds that, once planted, couldn’t not bear fruit. It just took them a long time.
So in that way, I tend to think of influence as a ghost haunting me, driving me insane like something from a Lu Xun story, rather than warm memories of writers I love, which is perhaps closer to how you think about it?
If, as you say, imitation is a necessary stage in one’s development as a writer, then perhaps there’s something similar to all of Freud’s weird oral, anal and phallic stages going on here. Just like how a child who, made ashamed of their bowel movements by their parents, grows up into an adult fixated on preserving the illusion of order and cleanliness, perhaps the shame I’ve felt over my own past imitation has made me fixated on “authenticity” and “honesty”, ideals that turn out to be impossible to achieve once you actually start taking them seriously. I’ve found myself in a strange contradiction between my inability/refusal to imitate, and the subjective sense that I’m completely unoriginal. If I’m not inventing my own style, and if I’m incapable of imitating another person’s style, what on earth am I doing then? Am I doing anything at all?
The Freudian analogy does suggest a course of action to overcome this conflict: learn to imitate in a healthy way — a way that leaves me satisfied. There are all sorts of barriers to this: I feel like I'm too old for imitation — I'm supposed to be a grown-up! But I've been feeling that way since I was 19, which in retrospect I realize was an age when imitation was still appropriate. Maybe when I'm in my 40s I'll think about my late 20s "I wish I had tried more to imitate other authors.” The fundamental problem that I think made my first attempt at imitation go so wrong laid precisely in that identification of style with self. My imitation was a full-scale identification — an attempt at becoming. Even now this is a frustration I often have with my writing, long after I’ve moved past those first youthful attempts: these words I spend so much time on are supposed to be me, and yet they’re not. I step away from them, come back the next day, and feel like Dr. Frankenstein did watching the creature he’d made come to life for the first time.
There is a certain author I have in mind (maybe you can guess who) that I think it would be worth doing a pastiche of. He’s a very funny guy, and it seems easier to keep imitation healthy if we stay in the world of laughter. Every single book of his feels very different to me — he wrote in every possible style under the sun — but one book in particular (which you are a big fan of) is structured in a way that it feels like a perfect opportunity for “creative imitation.” So maybe that can be my homework this week. (I’m imagining that these letters are a once-a-week thing, though we haven’t actually defined any timeframe — why am I always producing unneeded deadlines for myself?)
Now I have a few words to say about one of your other influences you mentioned: I’m curious how you’d characterize Kant’s “style”? I agree that he is not good at explaining things in a way that lends itself to understanding, but I find there’s a nice warm and fuzzy feeling I get reading The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s personality is all over it, even if we are lost inside the a priori world wherein even our own minds and, by extension, our personalities are noumenal beings that we can never know directly. Part of this is his propensity towards such grandiose sounding vocabulary as “the axioms of intuition” and “the postulates of empirical thought.” Part of it is the fact that he’s considered absolutely EVERYTHING and is trying with all his might to fit it all in a linear book that is supposed to have a semi-coherent structure to it, making the reading experience filled with surprises and double-takes as I ask myself “Did Kant actually just say that?” (I had this reaction over and over in the Transcendental Analytical.) Yet I’m not sure if any of this is “style” the way you mean it? When you imagine Kant’s voice, what do you hear? When you say coffee turns you into Nietzsche, I know exactly what you mean — Nietzsche has one of those voices that stays with you forever after only reading a single excerpt by him. Yet Kant’s voice is something else… It’s definitely there, but I struggle to put it into words.
As for Qian Zhongshu, I really liked Fortress Besieged, but I don’t feel like I learned much from it. In my mind, like The Count of Monte Cristo, it’s a book that I read during the summer at my grandmother’s house that I found entertaining and have all sorts of pleasant memories of, but I don’t feel it embedded deep in the core of my being, the way certain other books do. That said, if I were to be influenced by Fortress Besieged in some way, I think what’s most intriguing for me is how 19th century it feels to me, with a voice similar to what I remember from Lalka (which is, for me, the prototypical 19th cinderblock-sized novel). This is very obvious if you compare it something like Mao Dun’s Midnight, which is clearly written by a guy who paid attention to recent developments in cinema and tried to learn from them in his fiction. Yet I’m quite fond of how out of step with the times Fortress Besieged feels to me. I hope that as we go deeper and deeper into the 21st century, I too can write about contemporary events in a style that feels vaguely anachronistic, stuck in the past century.