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Sponge vs. Conduit
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, September 06, 2007
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Every author has his influences. Originality is a relative term. When we're asked where our ideas come from, an honest answer might be: "From other writers." Good authors borrow, great authors steal, and all that. Still, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The author's mind is often compared to a sponge -- it's always soaking up ideas. I'm going to suggest that some authors behave as sponges, which is good, and others act like conduits, which is bad:The sponge accumulates influences and gives them time to reconfigure in his mind. He takes what others have done but repurposes it in keeping with his own vision. When you read his work, you can probably identify some influences, but you aren't left thinking, "Hey, I've encountered this story before!"If you want to know the difference, it's that sponges are influenced while conduits merely imitate. There are some very successful conduits out there, writers who take every trend and crank out their own version of it, but I think there's something ultimately unsatisfying about such work. It's not just originality that's absent, but in some mysterious way personality seems missing, too.
The conduit is less artful, more derivative. He plunders whatever is popular and cranks out his thinly disguised version of it. In some cases, the process is so brazen that readers (or the author himself) can make one-to-one identifications.
