darkest before dawn

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.