Whose Work Are You Cloning? (Meher Intro) (11/16/2019)

Whose Work Are You Cloning? | The Weekly Atticus

November 16, 2019

This letter is a recap of the week at

Atticus Review

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Like most writers, I began writing first out of necessity, out of a need to tell stories and render honest characters, and then out of the hope that my work could inspire pure, unadulterated feeling in readers, the way  some other writers’ work inspires me. So naturally, my early experimentation with serious writing happened in imitation. I wrote to sound like Arundhati Roy, Kiran Nagarkar, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, and countless others, to create work that was derivative at best. But who is to say that an affected piece of writing cannot hold promise? 

Consider David Marchese, a journalist with work in

Vulture

and

The New York Times Magazine

, who is one of the most successful celebrity interviewers presently covering culture. Marchese, who has interviewed everyone from Quincy Jones and Emma Thompson to Erykah Badu and David Lynch, has the mechanics of a successful interview locked down. There is a genuine curiosity that he holds for his interviewee’s work and it resonates in his thoughtful and incisive line of questioning. He is able to get larger-than-life artists to not only take on his volley of questions, but deliver memorable responses, away from the cookie-cutter world of PR-orchestrated profiles. 

During a conversation with

, Marchese was asked to choose his favorite piece of past writing. He did not pick any of the viral celebrity interviews he’d done over his career, but a travelogue concert review he wrote before he became a journalist. While admitting that the piece was clearly trying to imitate the voice of music journalist Lester Bangs, Marchese doesn’t hesitate to admit something important he discovered about the review. “It made me think that I could do work in a way that I thought was interesting to me and that other people might have an interest in reading.”

In other words, an imitative, perhaps even derivative, piece made David Marchese realise that in producing work that was, first and foremost, interesting to him, he could arrive at something interesting for other readers. I recognized in that comment how, if I had not discovered and set out to emulate Roy’s playfulness with word building, Nagarkar’s biting scene renditions, Rushdie’s exhaustive emotional deliberations, and Murakami’s quixotic, surrealist landscapes, perhaps, I might never have demanded more from my own writing practice, might never have understood what was missing.  

In writing workshops, there is great emphasis placed on finding individual voice. Far be it from me to critique that, but there’s also value in looking closely at who we are trying to copy and asking each other why. Finding an answer to that will tell us a lot about what we hope for from our writing. And identifying that can bring us closer to understanding our voice. So I ask you this: Whose work are you cloning and what stories do you hope to excavate in that exercise?

Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.

 

Meher Manda

Interviews Editor

 

 

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

POETRYCERES IN THE CYBER APOCALYPSE by Anne Barngrover"At the end of the world there was alwaysgoing to be a womanalone and digitally vulnerable,shucked like drought corn, squalid as hair."READ ON

FICTIONMOON, MEby Nicole Simonsen"Milt is grateful for the family therapist, who has assured them that Ricky says outrageous things to test them. 'Just don’t take the bait,' he’d said."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONFORCEby Catharina Coenen "When my mother says she misses you, she is five and you are thirty-three, and tall, and back from the eastern front, but hardly ever home, hitching rides on horse-carts, hay wagons and trucks..."READ ON

BOOK REVIEWBRIDGE THE GULF BETWEENA Review of HOUSE OF THE NIGHT WATCH by Tara BallardReview by Toti O'Brien"...paints an articulated picture of contemporary life in the Middle East as seen through the eye of an American writer."GET THE BOOKREAD THE REVIEW

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