I have a sentence rhythm I use constantly — short declarative, then a longer one that complicates it — and I did not invent it. I took it, without meaning to, from about two hundred pages of a writer I read compulsively in my twenties, and it has been mine, in the sense that anything borrowed long enough becomes yours, ever since.
An Unconscious Theft
This essay is an attempt at an honest accounting, which is harder than it sounds, because most theft of this kind is unconscious. You don’t sit down and decide to steal a cadence. You read someone until their rhythm becomes indistinguishable from the inside of your own head, and years later it surfaces in your own prose with no citation attached, because by then it doesn’t feel like a citation is owed — it feels like breathing.
A Partial Accounting
I can trace some of it. The short-long rhythm above, I’m fairly sure, comes from a summer of reading Didion at an age when I was impressionable enough for it to rewire something. A tendency toward the second person in argumentative passages, which I’ve never fully shaken, is Baldwin’s fault, or gift, depending on your view of the transaction. A habit of ending paragraphs on a fragment — like this one — I genuinely cannot source, which either means I invented it or, more likely, absorbed it so early and from so many places that the theft is now unfalsifiable.
Nobody’s voice arrives from nowhere. It arrives from a few hundred books, digested past the point of citation.
The Reading List That Made You
What I want to push back on is the idea that this is a shameful accounting to make. The romantic myth of the original voice, arriving fully formed from nowhere, has done real damage to writers who assume their own derivativeness is a failure rather than the actual, universal mechanism by which style gets made. Nobody’s voice arrives from nowhere. It arrives from a few hundred books, digested past the point of citation, until the theft is complete enough to call it your own.
So: an honest accounting, then, and an argument for making your own. Find out who you stole from. It’s usually not shameful. It’s usually just the reading list that made you.
- Bloom, H. (1973). The Anxiety of Influence.
- Didion, J. (1968). Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
