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July 2006  
  
When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we
studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the
highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be
most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything
funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard
to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal
medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief
life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their
size made them perfect for use in high school classes, we read a lot of them,
which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number
three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could
just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered
advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in
which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed
deep.  
  
For most of college I was a philosophy major. I was very impressed by the
papers published in philosophy journals. They were so beautifully typeset, and
their tone was just captivating—alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly
technical. A fellow would be walking along a street and suddenly modality qua
modality would spring upon him. I didn't ever quite understand these papers,
but I figured I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them
more closely. In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. This was, I can
now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't really saying anything. No
philosopher ever refuted another, for example, because no one said anything
definite enough to refute. Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything
either.  
  
In grad school I was still wasting time imitating the wrong things. There was
then a fashionable type of program called an expert system, at the core of
which was something called an inference engine. I looked at what these things
did and thought "I could write that in a thousand lines of code." And yet
eminent professors were writing books about them, and startups were selling
them for a year's salary a copy. What an opportunity, I thought; these
impressive things seem easy to me; I must be pretty sharp. Wrong. It was
simply a fad. The books the professors wrote about expert systems are now
ignored. They were not even on a _path_ to anything interesting. And the
customers paying so much for them were largely the same government agencies
that paid thousands for screwdrivers and toilet seats.  
  
How do you avoid copying the wrong things? Copy only what you genuinely like.
That would have saved me in all three cases. I didn't enjoy the short stories
we had to read in English classes; I didn't learn anything from philosophy
papers; I didn't use expert systems myself. I believed these things were good
because they were admired.  
  
It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're
impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting
impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if
I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted
it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get
some truly startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's
an outlier.  
  
Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty
pleasures. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious,
they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people
reading _Ulysses_ are thinking "I'm reading _Ulysses_ " as they do it. A
guilty pleasure is at least a pure one. What do you read when you don't feel
up to being virtuous? What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's
only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through?
That's what you really like.  
  
Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to
be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws.
It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and
of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great
painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with
dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors;
their imitators are of course still brown.  
  
It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong things.
Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to try being a painter, and the
art world was so manifestly corrupt that it snapped the leash of credulity.
These people made philosophy professors seem as scrupulous as mathematicians.
It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was
forced to see the distinction. It's there to some degree in almost every
field, but I had till then managed to avoid facing it.  
  
That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting: you have to
figure out for yourself what's good. You can't trust authorities. They'll lie
to you on this one.  
  
  
  
  
  
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