Everyone's Writing Sounds the Same Now

and that's fine

Have you read that essay about the year of the girl? No not that one, the other one. The one that talks about commodifying our image in the new social media landscape. The one where they talk about bows and Barbie. No, I’m talking about the other one where the female writer shares a story from her own girlhood and connects it to Taylor Swift. Have you read that before? Have you read it a million times? Are you a man watching a woman watching that quote pop up on Pinterest and Twitter and Substack over and over again?

The Substack writer industrial complex has grown rapidly over the last few years. Thanks in part to writers like my dear friend Rayne Fisher-Quann (and, if we’re being totally honestly, mostly to just her directly), it seems that every other twenty-something teenage girl is announcing her newsletter dissecting womanhood and culture (hi, welcome to mine). Like with Twilight and One Direction, the old adage is rearing its head once again — if enough young women like something, it’s about to get majorly cringe.

I’ve been seeing more and more things with the sentiment of the Tweet above pop up on my timeline recently. To be clear, I love Serena. I think the Tweet is funny. It’s also clear to me that many people seem to feel exactly what she’s expressing, which is a certain fatigue at the young-woman-writer-type and their increasing prevalence.

This whole thing, in my view, is a series of cycles that have happened and will happen forever and ever in culture. Something is at first new and niche, then becomes popular, then becomes the norm (widely replicated with varying results), then is rejected and probably embraced again twenty to thirty years later.

Now, we make fun of musicians who whisper-sing about their troubles — the “bananys and avocadys” complex — but back in 2007, the culture absolutely lost its shit over Bon Iver’s landmark acoustic album For Emma, Forever Ago. Bon Iver set the standard in such a way that, to the uninitiated, that record would sound old, maybe even, god forbid, cringe.

In terms of music, artists are often spoken of as having a “musical family” of sorts. The folk musicians of Laurel Canyon in the 70’s would fry their brains with acid and toss around melodies in someone’s living room until genius struck. Phoebe Bridgers makes many overt references to Elliot Smith within her work and without. A common abbreviation at the bottom of music reviews is FFO, meaning For Fans Of, connecting this line of inspiration and similarity so that fans can find new music that fits into their existing tastes. It’s no secret that artists are inspired by each other, referencing and interpolating previous works, and existing within the context of a larger music history.

The first-ever works of any artist are usually no spectacular feat of ingenuity. And I’m not talking about a debut album or novel here. I mean the first time some kid ever picks up a guitar it’s probably going to sound like if Pink Floyd got blended up and put through a washing machine. Go ahead and look back at your old poems from middle school (I know my audience, I know you have them). They probably have a line or two stolen from Sylvia Plath or a Tumblr text post. They’re probably very bad but also earnest and clearly trying to be good. This is how anyone learns at all. It is a good thing for art and ideas to remain, in most circumstances, public goods available to take and make use of and create more things.

There will always be new innovations that create their own historical cannon and inevitable copycats that trail behind them. I’m not saying that every “girl essay” is good. It’s not. A lot of them are bad. I’ve certainly written some bad ones. But most of the failures here are simply natural parts of any young writer’s process and they should be allowed and even encouraged to happen.

A part of this certainly has to do with the increasing — wait for it — commodification (I am implicated in every critique I will ever write) of writing itself. If something seems like a sure shot to the top, there will always be people wanting to plug-and-play what worked for someone else and try to ride the coattails of someone’s better, more original idea. The good news is that even an amateur nose can smell a copycat right away, and we therefore mostly elevate the superior talents and hopefully make space for the aspirational ones to keep getting better.

There’s a reason that most introductory classes on songwriting or fiction or filmmaking will usually include an assignment that involves replicating a strategy done by a work you admire. You can’t ride a bicycle if you’ve never seen someone do it before. You can’t learn to play an instrument without learning other people’s songs. As much as people are precious about their craft and the idea that all of their output be credited to their own innate genius, you will never make something in your life that does not have the touch of another artist on it. That’s how it works. It’s spectacularly beautiful.

One of my favorite quotes on this subject was given by James Baldwin to LIFE magazine in 1963:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.

It is no crime for young artists to feel connected to a larger artistic history and want to be included in its cannon. Excluding obvious breaches such as excessive, outright plagiarism, it is no crime for young artists to make derivative or bad work. The idea that creative inspiration must have a copyright each time and be upheld scrupulously is one that best serves corporations, not artists. We do not need to defend the source of our art because it does not belong to us. It does not belong to anyone.

We can all pull from the well of beauty and feeling and meaning and it will never run out. We may all be telling the same stories over and over again, but they will mean different things to every person who encounters them. We can see the shape of our own stories in a feeling shared by millions, and millions may see their feelings in the shape of one particular story.

It serves no one to tell young artists that they must come to us fully formed and all their own, as that reinforces that such a thing would be not only possible but necessary. I love to feel inspired by the many great living and dead artists that I am constantly in reference to and conversation with. I love knowing that within what I create is a long history of people that have created before me — people I can thank and be reminded of and constantly try to be one-eighth as good as. I love seeing a new artist become more impressive, more tapped in to their craft, more careful and precise with every new work.

And when the revolution comes, I’d genuinely love to hear your take on girlhood while we wait for the battalion to come down and spear us all to death.