Obedience to manifestos is one thing; willing domination by a writer you love is quite another.
If you start off trying to be original, you’ll produce an object that is mainly distortion rather than matter. Something like an artistic black hole.
I did a lot of this in my teens and early twenties.
By contrast, if you say to yourself, ‘In this story, I am doing my very best to be X’ and you let anyone who reads the story know that’s what you were up to, then you’ll already be on your way to something original.
Because anyone who picks up an imitation spends most of their time examining it for where it fails to be the real thing, and in that failure is possibility.
John Keats’ earliest poem, in most editions I’ve read, is ‘Imitation of Spenser’. Keats manages four Spensarian stanzas, of the kind (over 4,000) that make up ‘The Fairie Queene’.
Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle
That in that fairest lake had placed been,
I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile;
Or rob from agèd Lear his bitter teen:
For sure so fair a place was never seen,
Of all that ever charm’d romantic eye:
It seem’d an emerald in the silver sheen
Of the bright waters; or as when on high,
Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the coerulean sky.
The subject itself, whilst being descriptive, is the inability of the poet to describe. There’s an almost comic doubling up ‘bitter teen’, ‘fleecy white’ and ‘coerulean sky’. This is Keats showing that his nature poetry will come from nature poetry, not nature. Secondariness is its first principle.
In 1812, at the very start of his move from medical student to poet, Keats creates an artistic win-win situation.
If he succeeds in being Spenser, he achieves his stated aim; if he fails, but reveals himself through that failure, he succeeds in discovering something about himself.
Keats was my favourite writer. And, whether or not I knew it, I began by copying him, copying his way of becoming a poet.
Once I started learning by imitating, I wrote a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, a dozen John Berryman poems, a hundred W.H.Auden poems and four or five Elizabeth Bishop poems.
Later, I wrote a Raymond Carver story, several Robert Cheever stories, an Ali Smith story and a Douglas Coupland story.
I even wrote an Evelyn Waugh novel.
Apart from Be More Specific, this would be my best advice at the start of the year. Wherever you are with your writing, give yourself some time off from being yourself.