The classic Citroen of orginal writing

The news this morning from France via The New York Times that book sales there increased from 2003-2011 by 6.5% has given one writer an idea that might bless other writers should the idea come to fruition.

Working on a book about the middle of France, one word at a time, this writer sometimes finds himself writing like other writers, which is not something he wants to do. He looks at the words he's written and doesn't see himself but sees others, writers he's read in the past, then strikes them out and starts writing again, hopeful of writing only like himself.

The idea dawns on him that if he had computer programming skills he might create a program for writers in which the writer of a creative text would be alerted as to any and all literary influences impinging upon his writing at the moment he is writing. Any trace of Bellow or Beckett, Joyce or Herta Muller, Daniel Defoe or Lawrence Sterne might be detected immediately. A special category could be developed for poetry, perhaps the most imitative of all the literary arts, in which one poet so often looks and sounds like another.

As a boy, well before he was old enough to drive a car or had ideas of becoming a writer, this writer responded to the aesthetic of the Citroen of the early 1960's as expressed by the exotic family in his neighborhood in Palos Verdes Estates, California who owned the only Citroen in the South Bay. The family was not French, they were German n, but they were eccentric, large, lively, in the publishing business and traveled to Europe on merchant freighters. He often wished his own family was more like them.