i want to write more

i'm reasonably certain of this. i only seem to write essays now, and while the essay is a challenging format with its own small joys and secret victories to celebrate, it always feels impersonal. i don't have an essay voice, i don't think. i suppose having a "voice" in academia is not necessarily a good thing. a well structured, well argued essay is a wonderful thing to witness and i always endeavour to write a more perfect essay, but essays leave the more creative aspects of one's self undernourished. i suppose you could attempt some sort of anti-essay, or meta-essay that but that seems onanistic and unlikely to score you much in the way of life-giving grades.

i want a "voice" but i don't know how to do it. i've heard it suggested that the way to do it is to start by imitating your favourite authors, writers with strong voices who you admire and would respect and just keep writing until it is your own. it its a little like cooking then. you start with a recipe and then as you get more confidant you can start making substitutions, changes and modifications until one day you don't even need the cookbook in front of you because your sex-positive gingerbread people only bear a slight resemblance, both compositionally and anatomically to martha stewart's. but the debt remains and should always be acknowledged. we are, i believe, simply walking, breathing bundles of influences.

there are no artists without influences, and if any claim that they lack them, it either demonstrates their ignorance (willful or otherwise) or their irrelevance, like the guy at a party who's tangents bear no connection to anyone else's stories. they aren't contributing to the conversation. the trick is to meld those influences into something meaningful. this is post modern i suppose. there are no new ideas under the sun. we can only hope to innovate through pastiche.

i'm not sure i believe that, but i am pretty sure that originality is overrated. when people complain that hollywood only makes remakes and sequels, what they obviously want are original ideas. but a project's quality has very little to do with its premise. what matters is execution. the a-team movie is not bad and uninteresting because it is impossible to make a good movie out of 80's tv source material, it is bad and uninteresting because it was made with an absence of care, love and passion for the project. sequels can be better than the original, remakes can be better than their source material and the movie can actually be better than the book.

if this were a essay proper essay i would have started with a more durable argument and i would be summing up my thoughts right now without introducing any new information. i would create a symmetrical effect by setting up callbacks and echoes of the original paragraph. its not though so i won't.