Stealing From History – We Should All Take Ideas From Others
You don't need to feel like you have to come up with all the good ideas by yourself. Lean on and build upon the work of others and ideas from anywhere and everywhere.
As I read Sitting Bull last night, a factoid in the story made me realize I don't steal as many ideas as I should.
By “steal,” I don't mean rip off or not give credit where due, but I've spent too much time in my life thinking everything I did needed to be original.
Which is insane when you think about it. I recently read Steal Like an Artist (loved it) and the puzzle piece in my head finally fully clicked into place -- we all build on the ideas of others.
I know during my time as a print editor, I had a few ideas that I thought were original.
They were not.
For the life of me, I can’t think of a concrete example as I write this. However, I do know that at least a handful of times, I researched what I thought was an original idea. When I discovered they weren’t (but at least that validated the idea was a good one and I wasn’t nuts), I took the ideas and adapted them to my needs.
It’s been 30 years, this is a lesson one would think I would have learned by now.
We don’t have to think of everything ourselves! Inspiration is all around us – USE IT!
Artists – Painters
I love the Smithsonian museums in DC and the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Walters (one guess where those two are). Even a person limited to "pretty/not pretty” for art appreciation can see the artists' influences on one another when you visit often enough.
Go look at art often enough (small digression, if you live in the DMV, take advantage of the world class museums – many free – around the place; incredible stuff to be learned and seen and felt) and you can’t help put start to see the connections between artists and styles.
I've known that artists learn from and are inspired by each other for years, yet never extrapolated that to myself.
Sitting Bull and Gunfighters and Bulgarians, Oh My!
Where does Sitting Bull enter in?
Remember the opening scene in Dances With Wolves as Costner rides parallel to the Confederate lines as he's shot at and missed -- twice?
That happened.
In 1864, a Sioux warrior named Long Dog rode parallel to the U.S. army -- twice -- at Killdeer Mountain.
Long Dog’s taunting ride reminded me of two other historical nuggets included in other works of art.
In Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's best Western (well, one of his two best, The Outlaw Jose Wells is also a great movie), Gene Hackman's sheriff is sharing how real gunfighting works to the pulp western writer in his office.
The writer gets excited about speed, carrying two pistols, and the “romance” of gunfighting. The Sheriff explains that slow and steady is how you really stay alive.
That's drawn directly from Wyatt Earp. Listen to it below.
I can’t resist a short digression here.
I always find it slightly surreal how recent the history of the Wild West is. Wyatt Earp died in 1929 in LA. Bat Masterson, Earp’s friend and fellow lawman, moved to New York City in 1902 and wrote, mostly about sports, for the New York Morning Telegraph from 1903 to 1921. There’s newsreel footage of Masterson introduction as a timekeeper at the Jack Johnson-Jess Willard title fight in 1915.
From cleaning up Dodge City in Kansas in the 1870s to timekeeper at a boxing match in 1915; I’m repeatedly amazed at how close history can be to us.
The second piece of history inserted into art was in one of Harry Turtledove's Byzantium novels (I forget which), he has an after-battle scene where the victorious army divides the prisoners into groups of 100, blinds 99 of them and puts out one eye of the 100th. Then turns them loose, roped together in lines of 100, to go back home. I recall reading as a teenager and thinking, "You've gotta be twisted to think that shit up."
Nope. You just need to read, a Byzantine emperor did that to captured Bulgarians after the Battle of Kleidion.
Steal More!
We limit ourselves when we think we need to come up with ALL of the ideas on our own.
As a writer, I’ve gotten much better over the last few years at jotting down ideas from everywhere – an overheard conversation, something I see while out and about, an idea I like in a book I’m reading, etc.
Now, don’t steal as in take them unfiltered and try to pass them off as your own.
But, keep your head on a swivel, your eyes and mind open, and your ears perked for inspiration. When you find inspiration, fold, spindle, and mutilate those ideas to serve your own art, whatever that may be.
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