Sample Freely, But Sample Widely. The hugely successful fantasy author…
By: Rob Davies
Tags: Art, Music, Creative Process, Creativity, Writing

Legendary music producer Rick Rubin implores all the artists he’s worked with — from Kendrick Lamar, to The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, to Adele — not to listen to the radio or any current music, as you will end of comparing it two what you’re working on. Instead, he urges them to find inspiration in more abstract, less predictable ways, by doing things such as visiting museums, or at least by listening to music that has already stood the the test of time. “If you listen to the greatest music ever made,” he said, “that would be a better way to find your own voice to matter today than listening to what’s on the radio and thinking: ‘I want to compete with this’.”

The hugely successful fantasy author Neil Gaiman once said, “If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.” The lesson: don’t pay too much attention to what those immediately around you are doing, or you’ll risk imitating them and losing your any semblance of uniqueness.

By taking from sources too literally, you not only run the risk of offending the originators; you risk losing your personal voice all together.

If you want to look anywhere for inspiration, take a leaf out of Rubin or Tolkien’s book (no pun intended) and look backwards, rather than around. There have been thousands of authors that try to write like Tolkien, but hardly any have tried to see like him. There are many Adele copycats out there, but none try to listen like her. Rather than copying the output of those you admire, copy their methods of input. Not only does Adele look back to decades past for inspiration in her music from the likes of Etta James and Bob Dylan, but to artists from other genres like Mary J. Blige and Lauryn Hill. Her unique artistic voice has developed not out of her natural talent, but her ability to select deep and wide source material and mix it together in a way that nobody else has.

One of the most demonstrative uses of this practice is fashion designer Marc Ecko’s series of airbrush paintings, influenced by the work of children’s illustrator Alan Aldridge and the characters of Lewis Caroll’s stories. They depict characters like Humpty Dumpty, Cheshire Cat, The White Rabbit and Alice from Alice in Wonderland, in 80s bling and in scenes you might find in the movie Boyz n the Hood. They were made into t-shirts that were sold his company Ecko Unltd in the 1990s and 2000s. The t-shirts have a cult-like status and the originals go for a high price today — you’re not going to see that being replicated without the most obvious copying imaginable.

In the late 1980s, artist David Hockney made a series of prints using a fax machine. The project was very high-profile at the time, but perhaps more interesting was the fact that a plethora of upcoming artists tried to copy his method to create art. None of the artists that copied him are still talked about today. They weren’t trying to see the way he was seeing, they were just trying to make art that looked like the art of someone who was a great artist.

When making art, it is important to take influence from a large, unpredictable pool of source material. Doing this has enabled thousands of artists in every field become unique and distinguishable from everyone else in the herd who wants to appeal to the masses by emulating what’s popular.