1) Are we truly independent? Free from outside influences and not dependent on others for ideas or inspiration. Now there’s a lie if there ever was one.
2) I am easily influenced by the eternal wisdom of the great poets, saints and philosophers. I look for inspiration everywhere and search for ideas across a fair array of disciplines.
3) Erudition drives our process. We are aware of our information gaps so we are always seeking more knowledge. We sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, and combine them into a richer new creation, even though it betrays its origin.
4) “This is what our mind should do:” wrote Seneca in one of his Epistles. “It should hide away all the materials by which it has been aided, and bring to light only what it has made of them.”
5) Consequently, in nearly all that we write, the very substance and texture is a product of mixing and remixing ideas and themes, borrowing from our store of reference points, and making new analogies and spotting unusual patterns, until a “breakthrough” is achieved.
6) At the most basic level, all of our new ideas are made up of old ones. “For substantially all ideas are second-hand,” said Mark Twain, “drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride born of the superstition that he originated them.”
