How to be inspired without copying - by JA Westenberg

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How to be inspired without copying

JA Westenberg<br>May 17, 2026

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In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand, working through at least nine of the L'estro armonico concertos like a medical student dissecting a cadaver. The work was painstaking, derivative on its face, and (as it turned out) the foundation of everything Bach would become. Once he'd absorbed the architecture of the Italian concerto, he produced the Brandenburg Concertos, music that sounds nothing like Vivaldi and could only have come from Bach.<br>The conventional warning is that you shouldn't copy because copying is theft. Austin Kleon's bestseller (Steal Like an Artist, 2012) tried to rescue copying from this stigma by reframing it as the basis of all creative work. He was right; but what does the heist look like, when it works?<br>The transcription test

When you copy a Vivaldi concerto into a manuscript by hand, you're not producing a Vivaldi concerto - nobody would think that. But you are forced to interpret a thousand small decisions about how the music coheres, why one voice enters on a particular beat, what makes the ritornello structure hold. You learn, through your fingers, why something works.<br>Hunter S. Thompson did this with prose. In his early twenties, working as a copyboy at Time magazine, he typed out the complete texts of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms. The point was never to plagiarise Fitzgerald or Hemingway; Thompson wanted to feel, in his hands, the weight of a good sentence.<br>Two motives separate good copying from bad copying.<br>One copies to produce a finished thing. The other copies to understand a process. The first motive yields imitations; the second yields apprenticeships.<br>What surface imitation gets wrong

A young writer who reads Cormac McCarthy and decides the trick is zero quotation marks is making a classic error. The aspiring filmmaker who thinks Wes Anderson reduces to symmetrical framing and warm yellow tones is doing the same. Steve Jobs gets reverse-engineered into a black turtleneck; Brian Eno collapses into longer reverb tails. Etc.<br>These are cargo cult creators.<br>The South Pacific islanders who built bamboo control towers after the war ended believed that if they replicated the surface details of an American airstrip, the planes would return with cargo. The towers were elaborate, and the construction careful. But the planes never come back.<br>Cargo cult creativity makes the same error. It assumes the visible artefact is the cause of the result, when the visible artefact is the consequence of something deeper and hidden. McCarthy's omitted punctuation is a consequence of how he thinks about voice, about the unbroken pressure of a sentence, about what a comma costs in narrative momentum. Strip the punctuation from another writer's prose and you don't get McCarthy; you get a manuscript that's harder to read for no good reason.<br>The imitators fail because they copy the wrong layer.<br>Influence as collision

Picasso said he wanted to draw like Raphael, and then spent his life learning to draw like a child. In 1957, at age 75, he locked himself in his villa in Cannes and produced 58 paintings reinterpreting Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656). He preserved the composition and the spatial relationships; the cast remained intact: the infanta, the dwarf, the dog, and the painter in the background. He produced a body of work that no one would mistake for Velázquez.<br>The Velázquez composition served as the immovable object. Picasso's cubist habits and Spanish political grief served as the moving force. The 58 paintings record what happened at the point of impact.<br>A violent collision is closer to the actual mechanism of influence than any of the polite formulations about being "inspired by" something. Influence operates as collision; the thing you make becomes original to the degree that your own concerns and limitations distort whatever you took in. Bowie cut up his lyrics using William Burroughs's method. Hilary Mantel built Wolf Hall on the bones of Holinshed's Chronicles. Sondheim wrote Sweeney Todd through the lens of Bernard Herrmann's film scores. Tarantino made an entire career out of the friction between exploitation cinema and an obsessive's encyclopaedic memory of it.<br>Their motive was to absorb something specific and put it under pressure. The originality came out the other end as a by-product.<br>James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) maps, episode by episode, onto Homer's Odyssey, written some twenty-seven centuries earlier. Joyce kept the scaffolding intact: the wanderer, the long way home, the underworld, the encounter with the dead, the suitors at the gate. He even prepared a private schema (the Linati and Gilbert schemas) mapping each chapter to a Homeric episode, an organ of the body, a colour, and a...