By Katie Lewis
Oscar Wilde once said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” As with any skill we learn, writers often imitate their favorite stories or authors while developing their own voice. And despite Oscar’s shade, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Imitation and repetition are simply part of the learning process. As someone who has spent most of my life steeped in a culture not my own, it’s understandable that my writing style became a unique fusion.
We Learn to Write the Same Way We Learn to Speak
From a psychological perspective, a baby’s brain is simply incredible. The human brain can learn almost any language in those first few months of life. Parents speak, and the child learns to repeat sounds until those sounds become words and, eventually, sentences. The spoken rules of grammar and use of tenses develop naturally from there.
Learning to express yourself in writing follows the same process. We read our favorite books, watch our favorite movies or TV shows, and experiment with recreating what we like on the page. This isn’t meant to be plagiarism, of course, and more often than not, this experimentation is done without publication in mind. Instead, we write these stories or fill the journal pages with them for a class. It’s an exercise to build our writing muscles.
Eventually, like learning to talk, we mix what we’re mirroring with our personality to create something new. Something that is no longer an imitation but our authentic writing voice.
As with determining what language we speak, the styles and structures we emulate as writers remain tangible influences just beneath the surface.
A Whole New World of Possibilities
I’m a Millennial, born in 1990. I’m half Italian and half English-German mutt. There isn’t a drop of Japanese blood in my family tree. Yet, how I write is closer to Japanese literature than American or British literature. However, I’ve always written for a Western audience. So, my style is a blend of both cultures, which makes perfect sense if you examine what I connected with most in my formative years.
The anime boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s was perfectly timed to hugely influence me. In elementary school, I read at a highly advanced reading level. As a result, I began to feel like I had exhausted what the school library had to offer. In short, I was bored and on the hunt for something new.
Anime (the Japanese for animation) hit the ground running in the States around 1998. There were small pockets of dedicated fans long before that, but when Pokémon hit the US airwaves, anime became a mainstream part of available media. Kid’s Saturday morning cartoon lineups became a mix of American and Japanese animated shows. Cartoon Network even dedicated an entire prime-time programming block to anime dubbed Toonami.
Most anime are adaptations of Japanese graphic novels or manga. When shows like Dragon Ball Z and Inuyasha took over the viewing charts, it was only natural that publishing companies began to look at translating the original manga. At the same time, the internet was in its infancy and teeming with anime and manga fan translations if you knew where to look.
And oh boy, was I looking. Upon entering middle school, I discovered the librarians kept an ever-expanding manga shelf behind the check-out desk. I’m not exaggerating when I say I visited the library every day of the three years I spent at that school. I read everything they had to offer, burning through two or three volumes of manga a night just to return and get more the next day.
Around the same time, I joined the Fort Collins Anime Club (which sadly no longer exists). I began to recognize the exceptional brand of surrealism present in many Japanese stories. Additionally, Japanese storytelling was often nigh on impossible to guess the ending. There are still recognizable tropes, but the very nature of Japanese story structure is that the narrative often shifts entirely halfway through.
I was in love.
Fanfiction: Modern Day Imitation
In the days before the internet, I filled notebooks and journals with stories and reimaginings of whatever anime and/or manga I was devouring. Our first dial-up connection brought with it my discovery that other people were doing the same thing, and it was called fanfiction.
Most people associate fanfiction with a specific connotation. Still, in its purest form, I’ve always thought of it as playing in someone else’s sandbox. The world-building and characters are already there, the stage is set, and all that’s left is to present a new experience. It absolutely counts as learning through imitation.
As of writing this, it has been almost exactly 20 years since I started writing fanfiction and posting it online. I’m a writer today because of the encouragement I got from strangers online, most of whom were women around the age I am now telling me at age 13 that they loved what I was writing. I was not all that amazing at writing at only 13, but I wouldn’t be writing this blog post without their critiques and encouragement.
I played with styles, points of view, and plot structure through the fan stories I wrote. Moreover, since I was writing for a Japanese property and needed the characters to feel authentic, I naturally began incorporating tropes and story structures aligned with Japanese storytelling.
My intended audience was always others from English-speaking countries. There was an expectation not to make anything feel too American. In that way, I gradually learned how to blend ideas, such as Western tales of dragons, with Japanese yōkai.
The End Result?
As a result of 20 years of imitating Japanese media and majoring in Creative Writing in college, I’ve developed a hybrid of Eastern and Western voice and style. And I’m not the only one. Aaron McGruder’s comic and animated series, The Boondocks, is heavily influenced by his love of anime and manga. The same is true of Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series.
The style influences on comics and animation are more readily apparent simply because of their visual nature. As more people my age and younger enter the publishing world, we’ll see the same distinctive shift in young adult and speculative fiction.
If you want to expand your style, I’m teaching a class about Japanese story structure called “Cultural Academy: Alternative Story Structures” at 12:00pm MST on March 20th. Please listen to my interview on the Writing Forge podcast, available March 5th.
I’ll be geeking out about all of this.
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