All of art is based on a quest for originality. As individuals, we become artists in an effort to highlight new ideas and invent new vantage points through which to view the world. As agents and editors and publishers, we’re seeking the one story the public has never read. And as readers, we’re looking for new experiences, new characters to add to our inner repertoire of literary friends, and new mirrors in which to re-envision our own faces.
In fact, when it comes right down to it, just about everyone on the planet is in search originality. That being the case, you’d think we’d have originality sprouting all over the place. And, yet, that isn’t exactly how it works, is it? Quite the opposite, actually.
Why Originality Is a Myth
In regard to the myth of originality, King Solomon had it pegged a long time ago: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Every story I write, every character I conceive has already been told in some form or another. I can come up with the most brilliant, far-out idea in the universe only to google it and discover half a dozen authors have already camped all over it. Because we all share the same basic life experiences, it’s little wonder we all tell the same stories. We’re all born. We all survive puberty. We all fall in love. We all grow old. We all die. End of story.
Should We All Just Stop Trying Right Now?
Where does this leave us in our quest for novelty (not to mention success)? Actually, when you think about it, the recognition of unoriginality is a very comforting idea. It means we don’t have to bash our brains out against our keyboards, trying to come up with the solitary surviving new idea. Instead, we get to embrace the freedom to tell our own stories our own way without spending too much precious time and energy fussing about whether or not it’s already been told. Tacked on the bulletin board above my desk is one my favorite quotes from Pulitzer-Prize winner Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (affiliate link):
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened.
These stories go on repeating themselves in fiction, as well as life. We’ve been conditioned to believe the only powerful stories are the original ones, but the very fact that life itself is not original means the most powerful stories are those that appeal to the deep primal emotions within us all. The universal emotions. The unoriginal emotions.
How to Write Amazing, Un-Original Stories
Just because Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist (affiliate link) a couple hundred years before we were born is no reason for us to ignore all subsequent tales of pickpockets and orphans. Patrick O’Brian’s success with Napoleonic naval novels is no reason our own characters can’t sail beneath the Union Jack at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And the sentient hares in Richard Adam’s beloved Watership Down (affiliate link) hardly negate the hundreds of talking-animal stories that have been written in the years since. In fact, these stories can actually influence our work in such a way that our own stories become deeper and broader than they might otherwise have been.
Dorothy Sayers said it eloquently in The Mind of the Maker (affiliate link):
The amount of matter in the universe is limited…. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree-form to create a table-form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before.
None of this is to suggest we need not strive to avoid stereotypes and overdone forms. If we expect to write decent fiction, and if we expect the reading public to pay attention, we must strive for originality as much as it is possible within the set patterns of our lives and our genres. Read widely, learn what’s been written, what hasn’t, and embrace and build upon the successful forays of others.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How does your latest story offer originality? And how is it un-original? Tell me in the comments!
