The Anxiety of Influence: When Writers Steal (and Why It’s a Good Thing)

There's a particular kind of fear that lurks in the mind of every writer: the terror of being unoriginal. The dread that everything they create is merely an echo of something greater that came before. That they are, knowingly or not, standing on the bones of their predecessors, borrowing phrases, rhythms, insights—sometimes entire worlds.

This fear has a name: The Anxiety of Influence, a concept explored by literary critic Harold Bloom in his groundbreaking 1973 work. Bloom argued that all poets—and by extension, all writers—must wrestle with their literary ancestors, sometimes to the point of creative paralysis. But what if this wrestling match is not something to fear? What if influence isn't the enemy of originality, but its very foundation?

Nothing is Original (and That's Liberation)

The mythology of creativity paints the artist as a lone genius, struck by divine inspiration in a moment of pure originality. This romantic notion, however appealing, crumbles under examination. No book, no poem, no idea emerges from a vacuum. Literature is an ongoing conversation stretching across centuries, each writer responding to, arguing with, and building upon those who came before.

Shakespeare lifted entire plots from earlier sources—Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke's narrative poem, King Lear from the anonymous play King Leir. Eliot wove fragments of other texts throughout The Waste Land like a literary collage. Even the most revolutionary novels, no matter how groundbreaking they appear, are constructed from inherited structures, ancient archetypes, and timeless themes given new expression.

Recognizing this interconnectedness doesn't diminish great writing—it liberates it. Once we accept that absolute originality is a myth, the writer's task becomes clearer: not to create something entirely new, but to transform, reinterpret, and remix existing elements into something that feels vital and necessary. Influence shifts from being a source of creative anxiety to a creative foundation.

The Alchemists of Influence

History's most celebrated writers have been master thieves, though they prefer the term "influenced." James Joyce didn't simply retell Homer's Odyssey—he transplanted its epic structure into a single day in Dublin, transforming ancient heroic journey into modernist psychological exploration. The result was Ulysses, a novel that couldn't exist without Homer yet bears little surface resemblance to its source.

Jean Rhys performed a similar act of literary archaeology with Wide Sargasso Sea, excavating the silenced story of Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. Rhys didn't merely respond to Brontë—she challenged the colonial assumptions embedded in the original, giving voice to a character who had been reduced to a symbol of madness.

Borges, ever the provocateur, turned the anxiety of influence into art itself. He wrote elaborate reviews of imaginary books, crafted bibliographies for fictional authors, and created a literary universe where the line between influence and invention dissolved entirely. If all writing is borrowing, Borges seemed to suggest, why not invent the sources too?

Even Simone de Beauvoir, whose She Came to Stay captures the psychological complexity that inspired one of our fragrances, drew directly from her lived experience with Sartre and their ménage à trois with Olga Kosakiewicz. The novel transforms autobiography into philosophical exploration, personal experience into universal insight about existence, freedom, and human relationships.

The Art of Transformation

The crucial distinction lies not between influenced and original work, but between transformation and mere imitation. The greatest writers don't photocopy their sources—they metabolize them. They take the skeleton of an idea and grow new flesh around it, often creating something that surpasses its inspiration.

This process requires courage. It means acknowledging your literary debts while refusing to be imprisoned by them. It means engaging with tradition not as a student copying homework, but as an equal participating in an eternal dialogue about what it means to be human.

The anxiety of influence becomes paralyzing only when writers pretend they're operating in isolation, when they deny the literary ecosystem that nourishes every sentence they write. Once we accept that writing is always in conversation with other writing—that influence is not infection but inheritance—the pressure to achieve impossible originality evaporates.

Stealing with Style

The question for any writer, then, isn't whether to be influenced, but how to transform what influences them. What are you stealing, and where are you taking it? How are you making it yours? The best writers are honest about their sources while being ruthless about their transformations.

In fragrance, we understand this instinctively. Each scent in our collection draws from literary masterpieces, but none attempts to simply recreate what came before. On the Road doesn't smell like a book—it captures the restless spirit of Kerouac's prose in tar and whisky, cedar and smoke. Heart of Darkness doesn't reproduce Conrad's words but translates his psychological journey into olfactory experience.

This is influence at its finest: not copying, but translation across mediums, across time, across sensory experience.

The Inheritance of Ideas

In the end, every writer is heir to an immense literary estate. The anxiety of influence dissolves when we realize that this inheritance isn't a burden—it's a gift. The greatest writers in history have left us their techniques, their insights, their hard-won wisdom about the craft of turning experience into art.

Our job isn't to pretend this inheritance doesn't exist. Our job is to be worthy inheritors—to take what we've been given and transform it into something that justifies the theft.

After all, the best thieves don't just steal. They steal with purpose, with vision, with the understanding that influence is not the enemy of creativity but its essential fuel. In literature, as in fragrance, the art lies not in avoiding influence but in transforming it into something unmistakably your own.