I've been thinking about originality.

Which is probably a fairly unoriginal thing to think about.

There's a certain absurdity to wanting to write something meaningful and then talking yourself out of it because somebody, somewhere, at some point in the last few thousand years, might have already said something similar.

And yet we do this.

We get an idea. A rather good one, perhaps. Something that excites us. Something that keeps us awake at night, rearranging sentences in our heads when we ought to be sleeping.

And then the little bastard in our brain pipes up.

That's been done before.

Oh.

Well, shit.

And just like that, something that might have become beautiful gets quietly escorted out the back door.

Not because it was a bad idea.

Because we convinced ourselves it wasn't sufficiently original.

The Villain Upstairs

I suspect the greatest obstacle to creativity isn't a lack of imagination.

It's the mind itself.

That peculiar little committee of critics, cowards, perfectionists, and self-appointed experts who apparently live rent-free somewhere behind the forehead.

They have opinions about everything.

Especially things we haven't actually done yet.

You can't write that. It's a cliché.

You can't tell that story. Somebody already told it.

You can't use that metaphor. It's been used a thousand times.

You can't possibly have anything new to say about love, longing, loss, faith, betrayal, redemption, or the human condition.

Really?

We've been telling variations of the same stories since Gilgamesh was wandering around Mesopotamia looking for immortality.

And somehow, here we are.

Still writing.

Still reading.

Still falling in love with stories about people falling in love.

Still finding ourselves devastated by the death of fictional characters who never existed in the first place.

Apparently, the fact that something has been done before doesn't mean we're finished with it.

Imagine that.

The Tyranny of Originality

There's an almost religious devotion to originality in certain creative circles.

Everything must be new. Different. Unexpected.

Subvert expectations!

Avoid tropes!

Kill the clichés!

And certainly there's merit in that advice. Nobody wants to read the same tired nonsense dressed up in a different hat.

But I wonder whether we've confused originality with novelty.

They're not the same thing.

A trope is simply a familiar storytelling device. A pattern. A recognizable structure.

The chosen one. The impossible love. The reluctant hero. The villain who turns out to be rather more complicated than we initially suspected.

These things endure because they speak to something fundamental in us.

We recognize them.

We understand them.

And, rather inconveniently for the originality police, we rather like them.

Fantasy readers don't recoil in horror when a dragon appears.

Good heavens! A dragon! In a fantasy novel! How dreadfully derivative!

No.

They want to know whether the bloody thing breathes fire.

And whether somebody is going to ride it.

The existence of a familiar device doesn't make a story unoriginal any more than the presence of a piano makes every piece of music the same.

Which brings me to music.

The Same Twelve Notes

Music is a marvelous illustration of all this.

Western music has twelve notes in its chromatic scale.

Twelve.

And with those twelve notes, we've managed to produce centuries of extraordinary music.

Bach. Beethoven. Mozart. Chopin. The Beatles. Zeppelin. Radiohead.

And an astonishing quantity of absolute rubbish.

Same notes.

Different people.

Different experiences.

Different ways of arranging silence.

Musicians routinely borrow chord progressions, rhythms, structures, and techniques from one another.

Nobody sits down at a piano, plays a C major chord, and suddenly recoils in existential horror because Mozart got there first.

Well, perhaps somebody does.

But I wouldn't want to spend an afternoon with him.

The magic isn't necessarily in the notes.

It's in what the musician does with them.

The hesitation before a phrase.

The unexpected emphasis.

The note held just a fraction longer than expected.

The peculiar way a person can make an instrument express something that language cannot quite manage.

Two pianists can play precisely the same composition and leave you with entirely different experiences.

One plays the notes.

The other tells you something.

And there's the distinction.

The One Thing Nobody Else Has

Here's the part I find most interesting.

Your idea might not be original.

Your plot might not be original.

Your metaphors might have been employed by a lovesick Roman poet two thousand years ago.

But you are original.

Not in some syrupy, motivational-poster sort of way.

I mean literally.

There has never been another human being with your precise collection of experiences, memories, disappointments, observations, contradictions, and peculiar little obsessions.

Nobody else has seen the world from exactly where you've been standing.

Nobody else has loved the people you've loved in precisely the way you've loved them.

Nobody else has suffered your particular indignities, celebrated your ridiculous little victories, or spent three in the morning staring at a ceiling wondering how everything became so bloody complicated.

Those things belong to you.

And they change the way you tell a story.

Two people can write about longing.

One produces a perfectly respectable paragraph about missing someone.

The other writes about the way an empty chair becomes almost unbearable in the evening.

Same subject.

Entirely different universe.

Because one person is describing an idea.

The other is remembering something.

And memory, particularly when it has teeth, is an extraordinary creative instrument.

Write the Damned Thing

I think we sometimes forget that writing is supposed to be an experience.

Not merely a product.

There's joy in discovering where a sentence wants to go.

In finding a character who begins behaving in ways you hadn't anticipated.

In following an idea down some obscure intellectual rabbit hole and emerging three hours later with absolutely no idea how you got there.

There's pleasure in the act itself.

And when we refuse to write because we fear being derivative, we rob ourselves of that pleasure.

For what?

To protect ourselves from the possibility that somebody might recognize an influence?

Of course they'll recognize an influence.

We're all made of influences.

Books we've read. Conversations we've overheard. Music we've loved. People we've admired. People we've wanted to strangle.

Everything goes into the peculiar machinery of the mind.

And eventually something comes out.

It may resemble something that went in.

That's rather how being human works.

The question isn't whether your work contains traces of other people's ideas.

Of course it does.

The question is whether you've done something worthwhile with them.

Whether you've added something of yourself.

Whether you've told the truth as you understand it.

And perhaps, most importantly, whether you've enjoyed the process.

A Little Less Fear. A Little More Ink.

I'm not suggesting we abandon originality.

Quite the opposite.

I'm suggesting we look for it in the right place.

Not necessarily in the premise.

Not in some desperate effort to invent a story nobody has ever imagined.

But in the telling.

In the observations.

In the characters.

In the strange little details that could only have occurred to someone who has lived your particular life.

Use the familiar structures if they serve you.

Write about love.

Write about dragons.

Write about impossible choices and broken promises and people who spend their lives wanting things they cannot have.

Good heavens, especially that last one.

Humanity has been making a magnificent mess of that particular subject for millennia, and I don't imagine we're going to exhaust it anytime soon.

Just don't mistake familiarity for worthlessness.

And don't let the imaginary critics upstairs convince you that your voice has no value because someone else has already sung a similar tune.

The world doesn't necessarily need another completely new story.

Sometimes it needs an old story told by someone who understands it differently.

Someone who notices what everybody else overlooked.

Someone who knows where the silences belong.

So write.

Write the foolish thing. The sentimental thing. The impossibly ambitious thing.

Write something dreadful and fix it later.

Or don't.

Not everything has to become a masterpiece.

Sometimes the act of making something is justification enough.

After all, there's nothing new under the sun.

Not even that observation.

And yet, somehow, the sun keeps rising.

And we keep finding reasons to write about it.

261104 I pulled out of the fuel station. In front of me, a shiny red late model jeep waited for traffic to pass. While we waited, I noticed the interior was absolutely filled with two broad gentlemen.

They sat shoulder-to-shoulder and filled the space so completely, I assumed there were two in the front and two in the back.

When the driver turned, I noticed they wore identical safety orange shirts, sported matching grizzly-Adams beards, truckers hats, and sport-shooting glasses.

I wonder if they were brothers. I wanted to ask. Or at least wave and acknowledge them. I sped up and rolled the window down to ask them. But they turned before I could catch them.

If ever there was a matrix-glitch-moment, two identical NPCs would qualify. All we needed was a black cat.

a lesson Babylon never learned

“Here I am raising up a destructive wind Against Babylon and the inhabitants of Lebkamai. I will send winnowers to Babylon, And they will winnow her and make her land empty; They will come against her on all sides in the day of calamity.

Warning after warning. But the arrogant cannot hear. It’s impossible. Stopped up ears.

I have a lot of problems, and I say pride is one of them. But it’s not. I think it’s fear. Fear of disappointment. Letting people down.

is the hand of Jehovah too short?

Finally! The dam bursts and a billable day appears!!

What a joy to have a busy mind, challenged.

I wonder why my client hired K instead of this link-head. I keep going back to Holy Spirit and its presence or absence in my life.

It’s a weird equation, most people wouldn’t understand, or who would think is complete baloney.

But the truth is, my life and livelihood has been dependent on God’s support my entire adult life. Well, my entire life. Period.

Four years ago, that began to shift. A mistake led to a series of decisions that closed the door on the blessings of built my life on.

What’s weird, is that I was aware of this, but unable to change anything. My wife says, people are stupid and inevitably conspire to stupid things. God, I wish I could counter that with reason.

She drives me nuts, but she’s right.

And I guess I love that about her: that she can name truths with the innocence of a child. The very quality that often creates frustration in me also breeds deep appreciation.

The human experience is a dichotomy.

I appreciate that she understands the importance of being present and believing in me. I thought she me abandoned it altogether. Or never understood it. But, we’re just different that way.

I think we both want the same thing, but the exact path of arrival is where we don’t quite sync.

She did a good job of reminding me last night that we would have fun. And she was right. We did. It was virtually a disaster, we only made $30 and spent a week getting ready for it. The cold front that blew in made it almost untenable… 55f isn’t bad until you have to sit in a chair and type poetry for 4 hours.

The beer helped too. Maybe a little too much.

The big win last night was that we got on the books for our Dec 7 workshop on writing and drawing. For the third class, I’ll start expanding on what has come before and hopefully get a broader community involved.

It feels weird when ppl in the congregation are the only invitees.

With a little elbow grease and some luck, I might be able to get a grant from the art alliance for actual advertising. Maybe even a spot on the 5p news.

Back to the Future is on while I doodle in 73. 55 pages to go! This volume is titled ‘Darkest Before Dawn’.

God, I hope dawn comes. I’ve had enough of night.

Idaho beckons.

living in the last of the last days. Earthshaking events will soon occur. Jehovah will put into the hearts of the nations “his thought” —that they give “their kingdom to the wild beast,” the United Nations. Then that greatly empowered beast, along with the full cooperation of all political powers, will remove the world’s false religious organizations once and for all. That event will mark the start of the great tribulation. Then what?

Further climactic events will follow. The nations of this world will launch a coordinated, all-out attack on Jehovah’s people. Why? The book Pure Worship of Jehovah —Restored At Last! explains: “Egged on by Satan, the nations will try to efface true worshippers —and along with them pure worship— from the earth.” What will follow this will be the most momentous event of all —the war of Armageddon. Jesus will lead his heavenly executional forces, including his 144,000 corulers, in removing this wicked world and in delivering us into a righteous new world.

#deardiary

Nobody remembered who built the Sage Beetle.

Some said it was a machine. Some, a saint.

Some said it was what happened when a war god crawled into a broken refrigerator and refused to die.

It stood in the dead fields beyond the city, headless and patient, with an axe taller than a man tied to one arm and three tiny skulls dangling from the handle whispering code into the machine. Its chest was a square black screen that had not lit in years.

Then, one dry, orange morning, it woke up.

The screen flickered.

A single word appeared:

LIQUID.

Across the valley, the Smoke King opened one enormous eye.

He was buried to the neck in the old factory, a swollen creature of pipes, tusks, cartilage and rust. Every breath came out in black ribbons.

The reek filled the valley and made the land miserable to inhabit.

The Smoke King hated the Sage Beetle because the Beetle did not breathe.

He hated anything that could survive without permission.

“Come closer,” the Smoke King called.

The Sage Beetle did.

Slowly.

Dragging the axe.

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

The Smoke King smiled.

“I know what you need.”

The Beetle’s chest flashed.

WATER.

The Smoke King laughed so hard that flames came out of his nose.

“No.”

The Beetle took another step.

WATER.

“There is no water.”

Another step.

WATER.

“There hasn’t been water here in forty years.”

The Beetle stopped.

For a moment the valley became completely still.

Then its screen changed.

SAVE ME JEHOVAH.

The Smoke King stopped laughing.

From somewhere deep beneath the ruined factory came the sound of something enormous turning over in its sleep.

The Beetle raised the axe.

The three little skulls tied to the handle began whispering.

Not words.

Directions.

Left.

Down.

Again.

The Beetle struck the earth.

Once.

Twice.

On the third blow, the ground split open.

A black crack raced across the valley floor, through the factory foundations, beneath the Smoke King’s throne.

Then came water. Not clean water. Not holy water.

Old, Buried water.

Water full of iron, roots, beetle shells, coins, bones and things that had been waiting underground since before anyone had named the place.

It exploded upward.

The Smoke King screamed.

His fires went out one by one.

His great orange skin began to peel away in sheets.

“STOP!”

The Beetle stood beneath the flood.

Its chest sparked.

Its metal body trembled.

For the first time in its long mechanical life, it seemed afraid.

The screen displayed one final message:

I AM NOT STUPID.
I AM NOT STRONG.
I AM IN NEED.

The Smoke King sagged into the mud.

The factory collapsed around him.

And something strange happened.

Under all the smoke, all the armor, all the swollen monstrous flesh—

there was only a small frightened animal.

Nothing royal about it.

Nothing evil.

Just tired.

The Sage Beetle lowered the axe.

Its screen went dark.

The little creature looked up.

“What happens now?”

For a long time, the Beetle said nothing.

Then the screen flickered once more.

DRINK.

And so they sat together in the mud while the dead valley filled with water.

By evening, tiny green shoots had begun pushing through the ash.

No one saw the Sage Beetle leave.

But for years afterward, travelers sometimes found three little skulls tied to branches near fresh springs.

And underneath them, carved into the bark:

NEED IS NOT DEFEAT.

Why in here there's a kitchen, For my sandwich fixin'. And a lounge to relax, Read and to roar. And when I need to sneak around, that's what secret passages are for. I don't have a tv But my library is full of books
And a great big bay window Where I sit and read and look.

When under attack from Rain, sleet or shine He's armored So I barely even notice. It's fine.

I Change his color every once in a while. Red, pink, Fuschia or blue he doesn't mind New colors make him smile!

They say “mans home is his castle.” But that doesn't sound as cool As living in a dragon Especially one with a pool.

So keep your old brownstone, condos and wagons. Because I simply LOVE, living in my dragon.