How to Copy Your Heroes and Find Your Voice
Let me throw something out there; any conversation about sci-fi and/or creativity that doesn’t include ‘Into the Spider-Verse' is a bad conversation and I want no part in it. Frankly, I’m disappointed in myself that it took six months to get around to talking about it. There are so many creative tidbits, concepts, and just generally cool things in it. The primary theme in the movie is finding your voice and path. The journey that Miles goes on to get there is interesting and worth talking about for artists. It’s inspirational and a very useful roadmap for developing a career as an artist. It might sound a bit controversial but if you’re struggling to find your own voice, copy your heroes. Yes I said copy.
Great Expectations
In both his life and his new school, Miles is struggling to find his way. Then on top of that, he gets the responsibility of becoming spider-man when his world’s Peter Parker dies. He’s truly feeling the weight of his expectations. I don’t know that there’s an artist out there who doesn’t feel that way at least a little bit when they start out. There’s all the expectations to make your art original or reflect who you are as an artist. To not do so, feels like failure of the highest level.
Here’s a couple bits of good news:
There’s no such thing as being purely original. Even the Bible says in Proverbs that there’s nothing new under the sun
Our heroes have given us the pieces we need to be original and they’re out there, ready to be picked up.
There’s that age old saying of good artists borrow and great artists steal, which is entirely 100% true. That sentiment is no better represented than in Austin Kleon’s book, Steal Like an Artist. It’s a great book, you should definitely read it. Early on, He writes this:
“Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.”
This sounds like the part of Into the Spider-Verse where Miles is wearing the poorly fitting Spider-Man costume and figuring out what to do now that Peter has died, doesn’t it?
To clarify, this doesn’t mean go out and write a story about a guy who gets bit by a radioactive spider and gets super spider powers as a result and call it yours because Stan Lee did it. That’s plagiarism and I don’t condone that at all. The copying Kleon is talking about isn’t duplicating, it’s reverse engineering to figure out how it all works together and what makes the good stuff good.
I heard a bit of advice on a podcast recently that was something to the effect of making the thing you want to be an expert in. Immerse yourself in the work of the greats and then make your version of it. For example, if you’re a musician, learn how to play a song and then make a cover of it.
Fun fact: The Beatles started as a cover band but started writing their own original songs so no one could completely copy their sets.
This is where learning your artistic lineage comes in. Having a long line of artists to draw from will help establish who to copy. Having a wide variety of influences will help cement the originality of your voice. Or as cartoonist Gary Panter put it:
“If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original!”
Absorb all kinds of influences. Don’t limit yourself on just what’s in your immediate circle, branch out a bit and explore new influences. Keep cool things you hear and see in a swipe file for when you need a little extra inspiration. You never know when a cool idea will show itself.
When you start copying and analyzing enough work, you’ll start gathering a wide variety of pieces to choose from for your own stuff, which is where the real fun begins. Remember earlier when I said to keep learning new songs? What will start to happen is that as you repeat the songs and keep improving at them, you’ll start adding your own variations which will grow into different chord structures which will grow into your own songs. You’ll be gathering pieces to build your own work.
Copying work like this will also lead you to a better understanding of your heroes and their mindsets when creating. How they think when they’re editing pictures, what they were feeling when they painted that stroke. If you want to take this a little further, watch behind the scenes documentaries of your favorite movies or interviews with your favorite artists. Going through this process will start to humanize your heroes a bit. Yeah, they might be rockstars or world-class photographers but they still have to put pants on and they still feel emotions. Kinda like what Into the Spider-Verse does with Peter for Miles. Miles feels all the expectation of being Spider-Man and then he meets Peter B. Parker from our Earth. He’s kinda schlubby, apathetic about the whole superhero thing, going through a divorce even though he loves MJ very much. It breaks the unattainable standard of New York’s biggest crime-fighter down to the level of a guy in love with his wife, likes hamburgers from restaurants with low health ratings, and has the powers of a spider.
Leap of Faith
Throughout the second act of the movie, Miles is picking up all the pieces of what being a good Spider-Man is from the other Spider-People like getting back up no matter how many times you’re knocked down and fighting for a cause. Miles still isn’t Spider-Man. That doesn’t happen until the pivotal, spine-tingling climax when Miles takes his leap of faith.
You’re not going to be like your heroes and frankly, that isn’t the goal. Even with all of the pieces you collect, there’s still going to be gaps. You fill in the gaps with you. The uniqueness that is you binds all of these disparate pieces together. This moves you from a state of duplication, to one of emulation. It comes from a fun quirk of being human which is that you can’t make a perfect copy of a thing. The more you emulate, the more you’ll find the “you” to be a valuable and versatile material. Yohji Yamamoto said,
“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.”
The more “you” you start using, the harder it’s going to be to put yourself out there. This makes your art more vulnerable and true to you. That’s what makes art good and valuable. Taking the leap of faith and putting yourself out there is one of the most worthwhile steps you can take as an artist.
Conclusion
I’m a big learner by doing. I have to go in and poke around with things before I REALLY understand how they work. My love for music actually started by learning songs on piano and then growing them into my own creations. A lot of other artists are like this; painters recreate masterpieces, mixing engineers match mixes, musicians learn scales and songs, the list goes on. The pieces of the creative bread are all laid out on the path for us to take from our heroes. Through imitation and then emulation, we pull the pieces together and find our own way to be Spider-Man.
Who’s your favorite artist to steal from? Who is your favorite Spider-Person?