Conformity first

No matter how rebellious, the poet has to account for what has come before.

Peter Roy Clark, The Art of X-ray Reading

We have all been influenced by somebody else, no matter how independent, how original or, as Peter Roy Clark puts it, how rebellious we may think we are. To rebel, one needs something or someone to rebel against. To be independent, one needs something to be independent from. To be original, one needs a contrast.

As ideas go, this one is hardly original, let along rebellious or independent, yet it seems important to recognize the debt we owe to those who have influenced us, whether to follow in their footsteps or to set off on our own path. Different influences would likely have turned us in different directions. Nature is vitally important — our talents, our aptitudes, our genes — yet nurture plays a role as well. We can never entirely free ourselves from either.

Clark is writing specifically about writers, and I will do the same. Writers are shaped by the language they heard as children, by the books they read when young and had read to them, by their teachers (perhaps especially their English teachers), by the writers who most moved them in their youth and, perhaps most significantly, by their own everyday experiences — their loves, their disappointments, their griefs, their successes. What writers (especially fiction writers) write usually reflects in some way their own lives. Novelist Richard Russo has admitted that he can't seem to stop writing about his own father, although most of his readers might never realize that.

Young writers often imitate other writers, whether consciously or not. Only gradually do they develop their own styles. Before rebellion comes conformity. You learn how others do it before you can discover your own way to do it.