I am deathly afraid of taking inspiration from the art I’ve experienced, and yet I do it all the time.

I’ve found most of my scripts take on the tone and cadence of whatever television show I’m binging at the time of writing. I think about a sort of subset of meme that uses a variety of images/videos alongside a caption to the effect of “me walking out of the theater with the new personality I got from the main character.” It’s the writing equivalent of that, I guess.

Is it wrong to pull from past works? Of course not! I suspect that everyone is doing it a little bit all the time. As the internet grows increasingly fast-paced, we find ourselves exposed to more and more media every day – a million little influences, impossible to track. I suppose I have a personal sort of stubbornness that wants to reject the subconscious, to be independent, to be in control.

I find it very, very easy to be discouraged from writing and drawing and photographing and filming and everything. Another change brought on by the modern internet-of-scrolling is the influx of reactions to art that we’re exposed to alongside the art itself. Never before has the average person been bombarded by so many opinions so constantly, and determining which are worth listening to is nigh impossible. I think they’re all rattling around in my head all the time, taking up space for actual ideas. Woe is me, the tortured artist, having to read tweets.

But there’s also a bit of ego in assuming that this is a solitary experience, that I’m uniquely impaired in my creative paralysis. We all care what people think about what we make, and we all push back against that. To put something out in the world – a movie, an essay, an Instagram post, an outfit – is to tell everyone who will listen something about yourself. To make art is to assert that what you’re saying is worth being said, that how you’re saying it is worth being heard. There’s a bit of ego there as well. 

Partially for your sake but more so for mine, I’d like to have my feelings wrapped up here in some satisfying way. Maybe the only way to be authentic is to totally ignore that external criticism that manifests itself inside. Maybe to do that is to reject the inherently collaborative artistic process. Maybe it’s impossible to make blanket statements about what a person should or shouldn’t do when creating something. I think writing these means I agree with them all, at least a little. The closest I can come to making a definitive statement is this: whatever you need to do to make art is the right thing for you to be doing.