Raise Your Voice Right: Steal Scraps from Expert Tables
Imitate, imitate, imitate until you learn to create, create, create.
Note: Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you! The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
You see their words. Feel the thunderous weight of them at the edge of your vision. Observe their beauty, their deft hand, and their easy and distinct rhythm as they flow across the page of this, your favorite book. Words that move you, stun you, and flat-out enchant the pants off you.
Absorbing them into your tapestry is a crafty lesson in pulling at threads.
How did they…?
Imagine. To have knit this sequence of colorful words and textures together, weaving a world of warmth and comfort and startling surprise—how can this be?
You see their words. Love and covet them. Wish for them to be your own. You want nothing more than to say: “I wrote this!”
To be as you, of you, by you.
Oh, to be as adept as the creator of those words! To be free as the air to compose such melodious refrains. Words destined to be solidified and immortalized in the histories and the inks and pixels of this fickle yet ancient medium.
And so, you steal.
You steal with your sticky fingers and your innocent mind.
Because…?
You are nineteen years old. Maybe younger. Sometimes older. Clueless. Not that that’s an excuse, it’s just the timeline. You are a writer in your dreams only. Beguiled and bewitched by the craft of other’s tapestries and the solitude and projection of their idyllic life. You are in love with both the nothing and the everything of it. In love with their words, their voice, their sound, style, and output.
Your fingers itch at the touch of it.
And so, you steal.
Their free-for-the-taking voice and style and tone are now yours. Vulnerable and there, you simply snatch and grab from the pages of this book and that. You copy, you imitate, you parrot and pose. The great pretender on a robbery bender, scribbling in notebook after notebook the lifted voices of others.
You are a masked raccoon of prose balanced on the edge of their bountiful bins, eating scraps and stuffing yourself with calories of creativity not your own.
It is instinct, not cunning. A desire to sound like them, to be like them, to weave complex and intricate worlds and stories just like them. You call it homage. An influence. An honor, really.
“Good artists borrow; great artists steal.”
You say this with no sense of irony. It gives you carte blanche to loot literature with no artifice, purpose, or grace. You simply shake the lock picks and crowbars from your go-bag, jimmy open the windows of their toil and labor, and filch the whole damn lot.
Once pilfered, you know of no way to fence it. Your crime is one of opportunity, not laundry.
And so, you steal.
Fox in the pen-house, burglar at the bookshelf, you feel the tickle of their rich yolks dribbling down your chin.
A little of you to smudge out a little of them, revealing nothing but the faint imprint of your idol’s influence. The combination of your heart and heat and tremors—the key to your voice vault—is still being cracked.
You will write something worth stealing. Eventually.
Until then, you will wear their coats, their hats, and their big ballsy boots. Wear their garb until you find your own private wardrobe, filled with suits that fit. Ones that rustle and move with the fabric of your voice.
You are yet to become.
You are becoming.
You are the totality of your influences, absorbed over time, and redefined by experience.
Until then, their hand in your puppet body will move your mouth to speak. Gums flapping, words snapping, sounds echoing through a voice box not yet broken. You are a freshly carved dummy, yet to find your timbre, your beat, your melody. It will come. And when the new, never-heard words are your own, when the notes you sing are authentically yours, the ventriloquist’s fingerprints will fade into dust.
There will be no handprint but your own upon this work.
Until then, steal.
Your voice trembles and cracks and goes sharp and flat and is tuned by all that you read and witness and absorb. The voices of others, a cocktail in your head shaken and stirred with your thieving hands in your thief’s lair, ring out, surrounded by your notebooks, your memories, and your pirate’s booty.
You must gorge yourself on the bread of other bakers and find your taste in the crumbs.
Steal.
Be a thief. A tone thief. A lifter of noise.
Be more or less them. More and then, over time, less.
Imitate the mannerisms, the gait, the flow.
Learn the makings of, the craft of crafting, and how to sit at the wheel and throw your own pots.
Do this through theft.
Not plagiarism.
Style theft. Voice theft. Tone theft.
Imitation.
Years of straight-up, broad-daylight, call-the-cops crimes against mundanity.
Then go straight.
Find your own racket. Stop stealing and start inventing.
Face it: we are all criminal understudies, plotting the demise of our leads while stuffing their priceless diamonds in our velvet memory pouches.
Raising our voices on the scraps of influence.
Learning to speak for ourselves, by ourselves, of ourselves.
No longer a wannabe—a wanna-is.
All raccoons wish to be wolves—wish to tear off their masks and maraud on the prairies of success.
All raccoons dream of howling at the moon.
But for now, the mask. The furtive looks. The crimes.
For now, the raccoon stealing bread.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen1
This week’s amends…
“I listen to it now and it’s hard for me to objectively listen to our past work, but I’m able to recognize stuff that I think is really supremely great and then stuff that is, you know for me, deeply embarrassing or not so great, or Mike could’ve used another one more edit, or one more pass at the third verse, you know. Anyway, I am my greatest critic in that regard but I try not to look back that much. I understand that the work is out there. Once a song is released into the world it belongs to everyone else and not to me and so that’s, you know, it’s not my place to badmouth my past work at all.”- Michael Stipe
Via Jesse Thorn’s podcast, Bullseye. You can listen to the 38-minute interview, here
On Rotation: “Country Feedback” by REM
Via a 19-year-old Janeen’s memories. Other favorite songs on this album include Low, Half a World Away, and Me in Honey.
Via A List of Beautiful Things
What religion do cats follow anyway? Aren’t they their own God?
Via Boing Boing
Why is there so much R.E.M. in this week’s post? I was 19 years old when Out of Time came out and I was OBSESSED with it. Not because of “Losing my Religion”. Nope. The song I kept rewinding my knock-off walkman was Country Feedback (embedded above). For the lyrics. I completely ripped off a line from that song in a piece of writing I did back then. Did not imitate, just flat-out RIPPED OFF.
Thankfully, the poem never made it out of a notebook because it is TERRIBLE, but it illustrates the imitation theme. I’m warning you in advance that Behind the Streams this week may have some awful 19-year-old Janeen scribblings shown in it (I have the notebook with me). Usually, I’ll share anything if I think it’ll help, but I’m nervous about this one. It is… horrendously bad.