How to be Original #2: Be You
This article is for: Everyone!
A goal for poets of all stripes is to be original.
No one wants to sound like everyone else; we all want our poems to strike our readers and listeners as something fresh, surprising, new.
But how can you do this?
One way, surprisingly, is to steal from other poets—I’ve written about that approach in this article.
But in this article, I want to tackle the other side of the coin:
One excellent way to be original is to be completely yourself—your utmost self.
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First let’s get into why this, and then I’ll suggest how to do it in a practical way in your writing.
Why does being yourself lead to originality?
You are unique
Perhaps I’m stating the obvious here, but there is no one else alive on earth now who is the same as you. Nor has there ever been anyone else who was the same as you, and there will never be anyone born in the future who’s identical to you either.
You are a completely original being.
Yes, there are plenty of people around who are similar to you, in some ways, or even in several ways. But every single one of those people is also not like you in significant ways.
No one else has exactly your particular combination of experiences, thoughts, dreams, skills, and so on.
Therefore, if you could just write yourself—your deepest self, where you are truly unique—you would be just as unique as you are.
Phew! So that was easy. Now you can just go and be you, and create amazing poems.
In that case, why don’t we all do it all the time?
Sadly, simply being unique as a person doesn’t automatically mean that your writing will also be exceptional. It is in fact quite hard to translate one into the other.
So I'm going to go over what I see as the main reasons why this is, so you can see what blocks you, and overcome it!
1. Believing in your uniqueness is not easy.
I think we all tend to feel that, deep down, we are not all that remarkable.
If you’re like many of my past students, you might think things like this:
I haven’t done much that’s interesting
I don’t have any amazing insights to share with the world
I don’t know anything important
I am basically pretty average and don’t have anything new to say.
We pick up these beliefs over time (perhaps through living in a culture that idolizes people who stand out in obvious ways), and they are very hard to shake.
However, none of this is true.
Back in the UK, I used to teach Life Writing for the Open University. Every student I ever taught started off by saying, “I can’t write about my life! I’m not interesting and I haven’t done anything!”
However, once I got them writing about the granular details of their lives, past and present, they created compelling pieces.
As they shared them and got feedback from me and from the group, they realized that, just by being human, they were fascinating and they had a great deal to say.
The same is true of you—even if it’s hard to believe.
Once you go deep down into the most tender and urgent aspects of your existence, past and present, you will tap into details and feelings that can make your writing distinctive and powerful.
2. Revealing your deepest self in your poems is scary.
However, believing that you are unique and remarkable is only a first step. You also need to allow your poems to show this.
And, not surprisingly, you may feel reluctant to be that “naked” or open in poems that other people, including maybe strangers, are going to read.
Of course I sympathize with this, and I want to offer two thoughts about it.
First, I have found that the risks of being self-revealing in poems have always been worth it. Poetry readers and listeners usually value strongly poets who are able to share their innermost hearts and minds. (Sharon Olds comes to mind.) The positive feedback I’ve had on my more vulnerable writing has made me glad I did it. So I encourage you to try it out—gently and in a small way—and see how it works for you.
Second, you can write about profoundly important personal topics without having to bare your soul, if you don’t want to. There are always creative ways around it. I think of Natasha Tretheway, former US Poet Laureate. She is the child of a black mother and white father, and she often writes about this mixed heritage in ways that are not about her own life: by inhabiting characters from the past, for example, or by writing about colonial-era paintings that depict people of “mixed race,” as it was called then.
So experiment and see what kind of approach works for you. It's worth challenging your level of comfort somewhat, but it doesn't have to be torture.
3. Being original in the way you write your poems is also scary
Yet another reason why it’s not that easy to be yourself in poems is that when you do, you don’t sound like anyone else.
Just as no one else has exactly the same life as you, no one else who writes poems has exactly the same feel for language and form that you do. This means that if you’re being fully yourself in a poem, it’s going to end up different from the poems of all other poets ever.
Now, this ought to be a good thing. Don’t we all want “our own voice” in poetry? And isn’t this the whole point of “originality”?
Yes, definitely! But the problem we have is that when our writing sounds like no one else’s, we tend to think we’ve got it wrong.
As a workshop leader, I have seen this happen time and again. People think that their work is less good than the rest of the class, just because it is different.
In most areas of our lives, doing the same thing as other people is a good thing—in fact, we appears to be hard-wired to want to copy others. Psychologists call this “Social Proof”: the idea that we all watch out for what others are doing, then want to imitate it.
While this may generally work in life, it doesn’t help you be original. To do that, you have to believe that sounding different is valuable, not troublesome.
I remember one student I taught long ago for a college course, who spent the whole time writing fresh, quirky little pieces that fully reflected her interests and her way of using language, and which I greatly enjoyed. I’d never read anything quite like them, and I was all ready to give her the "A" she deserved. But then for the actual assessment, she submitted a poem that sounded like Wordsworth, only 200 years too late. Which do you think were better poems, the mock-Wordsworth or the ones that sounded like her? But in her mind, the Wordsworth poem was much stronger, because it sounded like someone who was “a good poet.”
In other words, it’s hard to have confidence that when we’re doing our own thing, we’re doing the right thing.
Again, I totally get this. I vividly recall taking a part-written poem to Charles Simic, my teacher at UNH, that I was very unsure about, because I hadn’t done any of my usual things to make it “a poem.” Instead, I had basically taken language from my journal and put it into lines and a couple of sections. I didn’t think it was any good—I only took it to him because I had an appointment and I didn’t have anything else written!
To my astonishment, he loved the poem and encouraged me to complete it. Later it became the heart of a submission that won a major prize.
What happened in that poem? I got out of my own way! I stopped trying to sound like the poets I was reading, and used my own natural language. (I think it also helped that the poem was about topics very close to my heart, too.)
4. Getting to your truest self is hard work
Lastly, I want to point out that the kind of “being yourself” I’m talking about is not the kind where you get to do whatever you want, however you want!
In fact, it’s something that takes a lot of discipline, awareness, and courage.
That’s because you need to tap into the Deepest You. The Deepest You has the coolest ideas, the strongest emotions, and the things to say that no one else does.
But the Deepest You does not reside on the surface. To get to it, you’ve got to dig hard!
Also, the Deepest You is also not necessarily a comfortable place to go: it’s where the contradictions and problems of your life are at their most raw, as well as the excitement and creativity. So to go there, you have to be ready to accept the tough stuff.
This is challenging, and you may not want to do it—and that’s OK.
But as with revealing yourself in poems, the good news is that there are degrees of this. It’s not an all-or-nothing deal. You can dip a toe in, and try out how it feels to go somewhat into those deep places, without having to plumb the bottom straight away—or ever. Whatever you can bring back from there will be useful in your poems.
Now let’s move on to:
Practical techniques to find poetry originality through being “more yourself.”
Find your Deep Self
I said last time that being fully yourself is hard work.
This is because when I say “be yourself,” I’m not talking about the easy You: the You on the surface, the You who skates through your days successfully driving cards and writing emails and feeding their dogs/cats/children/themselves, without having to think too much about it.
That version of you isn’t going to make great poems.
For originality, you need to get to the Deepest You.
The Deepest You is way down in your Creative Unconscious. It’s where the multitudes of experiences, past and present, that make up your life get melted down, mixed together, and recombined into stunningly unique ideas.
This is where real originality lives. And if you can get your Deepest You to talk to you on a regular basis, you will make amazing poems.
So, here are some ways you can drop a bucket down into that pool of wonder, and have it come back full. Probably not all of them will work for you—they don’t all work for me, at least not all the time—and that’s fine. Try them out and see what suits you.
1. Freewrite
Freewriting is my favorite tool for reaching hidden depths.
I explain freewriting in detail here, but basically it is writing down, as fast as possible and without stopping, all the things that go through your mind, with no censorship or attempt to shape what comes out.
The whole point of freewriting is that it helps you catch the things that you didn’t know you were thinking.
By writing fast and continuously, you quickly exhaust all the conscious thoughts you were having when you started, and that then forces your Creative Unconscious to start pumping new thoughts up to the surface. And by not censoring or choosing among those thoughts, you encourage your Creative Unconscious to send up more and more, including the good stuff!
2. Write while listening to music
Another way of getting your Creative Unconscious to give up its best material is to distract your conscious mind, and music can do this.
The technique is very simple: whilst playing a piece of music, start writing, and—as in freewriting—don’t stop.
While your conscious mind listens along to the song, it stops paying full attention to the words you’re putting down, which allows your Creative Unconscious to sneak out!
It takes a bit of practice, because you have to try to stay aware of both the music and what you’re writing—I tend to get so into what I’m writing that I ignore the music.
But if you can keep the listening going, you should find yourself writing down things that otherwise would never come into your head.
3. Write while counting from 100 to 1
This one drives me nuts, but I have seen it work for others, so I’ll include it. Again, this is about distracting your conscious mind.
Count, out loud, from 100 down to 1, without stopping. While you count, write.
Yes, it’s as hard as it sounds. And yes, it can produce some wild things!
As with the music idea, the counting distracts you and hopefully lets you write some thoughts down that you’d never otherwise reach.
4. Write lists—long lists
This one’s easier, but still works well.
Whenever you’re in search of an idea, instead of thinking of 2 or 3 possibilities, think of 20 or 30. And do it fast.
Like freewriting, listing in these quantities and at high speeds means you run out of easy ideas and have to make up crazy ones! And so your Creative Unconscious has to join in and help.
5. Use Chance
(Last one for now! There are other ways, but I think this is enough to be going on with.)
Chance is a really interesting way of digging up amazing things from your Creative Unconscious. It works by taking you and your conscious choices out of the picture, giving your Creative Unconscious a more open road to the light.
What I mean by using Chance is basically finding random starting point (or points) for a poem, rather than ones you influence, then letting ideas gather around it freely.
For example, you can:
Pick 3 words at random from as many sources, and see what ideas they generate together. (For example, try “tongue,” “listening,” and “benevolent.”)
Have someone email you a picture to write about. You don’t get to choose the picture.
Look for newspaper headlines or phrases in Facebook posts that suggest things to you.
For all of these, explore what comes to your mind, and try to be open to lots of ideas. Make a list of 10 or 20 more possibilities, perhaps.
Trust Yourself
All those tools (and others) are great for getting at your most original ideas, and that’s very important. You can’t make a good meal without good ingredients, and you can’t make a good poem without strong ideas.
But a bunch of ingredients won’t turn themselves into a haute cuisine masterpiece: you’ve got to cook them.
Similarly, you’ve still got to shape and form your raw ideas to make a poem—and at this stage too, you can practice some ways to “be yourself” as you write.
1. Use your language
The most important of these, I think, is to use your own language, not anyone else’s.
We all have unique ways of using words. Out of the huge resources of English, or any other languages you write in, you select vocabulary, expressions, and ways of forming sentences (syntax) that are not quite the same as anyone else’s.
This is basically what we mean by “voice” in poetry: the sense of an unrepeatable individual speaking to us.
If you use a unique voice like that to express your unique ideas, you’re definitely going to be original!
So when you’re drafting, don’t aim for language that sounds “poetic.” Aim for language that sounds like you: the words and sentences that come naturally to you, that you might use if you were writing a letter or journal.
Now, this might worry or confuse you. You might think, how can the kinds of ordinary, boring language that you use every day possibly be poetry?
Well, I suggest trying it out. You might be surprised. Oftentimes ideas come across with more force when they’re expressed more directly and maybe a bit roughly, than when they’re meticulously crafted.
But on the other hand, this doesn’t mean that you should always use the kind of language you use when you speak. As writers we also have a relationship with written words that’s different from how we talk to others every day, and of course it’s OK to use abstruse, recondite words and labyrinthine sentences if you have a love for them!
And finally, using your own language doesn’t make clichés and tired descriptive phrases OK. You still need to put the work into finding fresh ways of saying things—but with your kinds of words.
2. Use your comparisons
This is pretty much the same point as the last one, but applying to comparisons—metaphors, similes, personification—rather than language in general.
In theory, there are infinite numbers of ways to make comparisons: we can compare anything to anything.
But in practice, we tend to fall into conventional patterns, such as using elements from nature to compare things to.
This is a shame! It’s much better if you can make up comparisons that no one else has even considered.
So again, this is a great area in which to trust yourself. If you have kooky and unusual ways of making comparisons, then put them in, especially if they sound like no one has ever used them in a poem before. British poet Selima Hill has made a whole career out of doing this, and it works very well.
3. Handle form your way
As well as words, poetry is of course made of form—the shape of the words on the page. And here too, don’t be constrained by what you think other poets do.
If you want to add tabs in the middles of lines, do it. If you want to mix very short and very long lines, do it. If you want to include footnotes, do it
Or at least try it. Maybe your experiments won’t all work, but some will, and it should make a form that looks and feels like you—an extension of your voice for that poem.
And these days poets really do use form and shape in every way imaginable, so no one can say you can’t do it!
4. Keep reading, keep learning
Before I leave this topic, I want to say something very important on how “being yourself” does not mean ignoring what other poets do.
I very strongly believe that you need to read well to write well. It’s vital to get a steady flow of exciting new inspiration from what you see other poets doing, partly because this is one of the things that fills up your Creative Unconscious with ideas.
I also think it’s even important to imitate other poets consciously sometimes, especially when you see them using a technique that you want to learn.
It’s just that, eventually you will reach a point where you can absorb what you read into yourself and your language and make it your own. For more on this, please see this article.
Push Yourself
The last stop on the ride may not sound all that practical, but I think it’s vital. It’s an attitude you can use to guide at least some of your writing:
Keep seeking out the raw, unsettling edge as you write.
If you keep doing what’s comfortable, in topic and in technique, you won’t challenge yourself to reach that Deep Self where the original ideas live.
Instead, you need to be brave: try out new things, deliberately choose (at least sometimes) to pursue what you might rather avoid, put things in your poems that might make you or your reader uneasy.
As always, this comes with a health warning: don’t do anything too risky.
But small risks, repeated, will take you into new territory, and that means originality!
Next Steps:
Go through your archives for a poem that seems as though it ought to work, but doesn’t. The subject matter is interesting, the language and form seem OK, but somehow something is not sparking.
You are going to work on this poem by making it more your own—more original.
First, dig deeper into the ideas of the poem.
—Do a freewrite on them—or several freewrites!—until you get to some new ways of thinking about the topic. —Pick words from a book of someone else’s poems, and see what they suggest that relates to this poem.
—Do a cluster, or several, on aspects of the ideas.Let these notes sit for a couple of days, and during this time, make sure you don’t look at the poem draft either.
Then work on making your expression of the ideas more “you”: Ignoring the previous draft of the poem, rewrite it.
—When you remember how you expressed an idea first time, find a new way to say it now.
—Use the first words and phrases and line breaks that come to mind—not the ones in the original version.
—Add new ideas from your new notes (the freewrite etc.)
These steps should add originality both the ideas and to the language/form—and that should give you a draft that has more potential.
