When I tried to find a difference between influence & inspiration

I decided early on that I wanted to be a writer. This was maybe in kindergarten. Then, in high school, my Latin teacher gave me some advice. To be a writer, major in Classics. I suppose you could say that it all started with that. And really, it all started with Daphne and Apollo. It all started with the story of a girl who was trying to run away from a boy (should I have seen this as foreshadowing?… who knows).  

I fell in love with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses is an epic poem that turns the genre on its head – it does not follow one hero (think Odyssey and Aeneid), does not follow the journey of one man, or have a typical story arc. It has many characters. It has many stories. (Although it preserves the epic in its meter, dactylic hexameter, and in its length.) All the stories deal with transformation: humans become vegetables, animals, minerals, sometimes foliage, sometimes stones. Each story often answers the question “why do we have this?” or “how did that come to be?” They are aetiological myths. The reason for why the laurel tree exists, for example: Apollo wanted to marry Daphne and Daphne did not want to marry Apollo, and so she was turned into the laurel tree. Transformation is fascinating. The way that stories themselves transform is fascinating. Ovid is an inspiration for many writers, and unofficially, I’m sure one can trace almost any story back to the Metamorphoses. We can trace Shakespeare himself back to the Metamorphoses: check out Pyramus and Thisbe and see what that story reminds you of.      

In college, I wrote my own short story based on Daphne and Apollo. The idea still won’t leave me. And then, I started a larger project: a group of stories inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Since then, I have spent a lot of time thinking about inspiration and influence. One teacher, whom I asked to be an advisor for my creative thesis, could not wrap her head around the idea that I would be writing short stories that, as I put it, were “influenced” by an epic poem. (What word should I have used? Based on? Inspired by? Influenced by?) In my own mind, the jump wasn’t that far: the nature of epic poetry, the length, that much of the Metamorphoses actually told stories.What I wondered was if there really was a difference between inspiration and influence. I was letting Ovid inspire my own stories, but I wasn’t necessarily rewriting them as an epic, or even as poetry. I used similar themes and circumstances for my characters, but I wanted to produce a story that someone reading today could relate to.

It’s hard for me to think about The Metamorphoses and not think about the way that stories and movies have been remade in recent (and also not so recent) years. The remake culture also has something to do with race and gender and class and that seems to be relevant now. The people who make movies, keep casting white men, just like in the originals. While I guess there is something about creating a story that is sure to make money, and the old stories are tried and true, this kind of remake is becoming boring. To me, it’s the pieces that really and truly reimagine the story so that I can recognize the place it came from, but it’s not like I’m sitting through the same thing over and over again, with different special effects.

Once, in graduate school, I wrote a paper that had to do with the influence of a Classical author on the genre of autobiography and memoir. I was making a giant leap, comparing Ovid and the contemporary poet Eileen Myles, and I was doing it poorly. I did not do well because I misused the idea of influence- I did not understand how to correctly refer to influence. Influence has to do with style, or the way one writes. Style means syntax, word choice, voice, etc. What I read influences what I write. I get a sentence structure, a plot structure, character building stuck in my mind, a rhythm of dialogue, and I try to mimic it. When we talk about the Classics and their influence on our own writing today, it seems like we very rarely are referring to sentence structure, word choice and the things that have to do with style. (We definitely no longer speak or write like Shakespeare or Cicero.)

Once, I had a student argue in class that there was no such thing as influence. Each story was a completely new one and did not necessarily have roots in any literature that came before it. He argued that reading did not influence style. I argued the opposite. How could I not? The only way that other writers would not influence me is if I didn’t read. And I do plenty of that.

When I think about the influence that the Classics have on nearly every kind of story we have today (and yesterday), and on my own writing, the kind of influence that I am talking about is not always a stylistic one. I’m not writing stories in the epic genre and I’m definitely not writing in dactylic hexameter. The stories that I’m thinking of have similar plots, similar characters, but they deal in contemporary currency. I like to think about the short story “Demeter,” by Maile Meloy. This story is a child custody case, which draws themes and plot from the Greek and Roman myth, but ultimately places it in a different time (we’re no longer dealing with the god of the underworld). The syntax and word order are more modern, more similar to contemporary writers than to the original myth. She reimagines the story so that it is relatable to today’s audiences – the kind who reads The New Yorker.

In a big way, whether we realize it or not, the Classics, mythology, really do trickle down to our own writing. We are constantly remaking the old. And I’m not talking here about simply recasting a different person of the same skin color, stature and demeanor in the same role. I’m talking about a positive kind of remake, the kind where we pay homage to the stories that came before us. They rely on the old themes, the old concept of human nature, but things change, they transform, they become new, again.

(Photograph of a sculpture by Antoni Tápies; taken by me in Barcelona)