The Ecstasy of Influence

Johnathan Lethem states, in this article: "The Ecstasy of Influence,""You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you." I think what he is saying in the section "Give All" that artists should be allowed to choose who they want to read their stories/novels or their poems or view their art or their paintings. Yet, they should understand that when it is published, when it out there for the entire world to see they can't choose anymore. And by allowing it to be published, to allow for it to be seen by any reader or viewer they are relinquishing the control that they have over it. It doesn't become theirs anymore, it becomes the readers' or the viewer.

Lethem, also, goes on to say that there is no new story out there. That writers are writing the same stories over and over again in different versions and in different ways to the same expecting audience. I believe this to be true. As a writer myself, you find it hard to branch out and write about something that is completely unique and completely different from anything else that anyone else has read or written before. The situations and the experiences are the same, they alter from generation to generation, they change with the people, but they stay the same. So, how do we define plagarism? I would say it would be taking word for word of someone else's work. But then you have to ask, what about stealing the idea? I once had a poetry professor tell me, that all a poem is or ever will be is stealing lines and ideas from other ideas or stories or lyrics to create something that said those feelings or emotions in a different way-- from a different angle.

So, what does it mean to be an artist?-- To replicate and make better the art that came before? I once had someone tell me, you write about what you know. This is true. I can only write about the things that I know and have experienced. Other writers have also experience the same things as I have, but in different ways. But the way that I tell my story is going to be completely different from how they tell theirs, and that is what makes it different. That is what defines it as unique.