Writers Unbound

Is There Anything Original?

I don’t like those Facebook quizzes that tell me that I’m a 75.7% match with someone I barely know on movie preferences. I don’t want to know how very, very like other people I am. I want to be different.

But I want to fit in.

You know what I’m talking about, because you’re probably just like me. (Don’t you hate it when people say that? Didn’t something in you just rise up and say, “Oh no I’m not” when I made that assumption about your lack of originality?) But there’s truth there. True originality is elusive. We can’t really define it, though we feel the lack of it. We want to have it and be it just like everyone else does. We don’t know how.

Several thousand years ago a very wise man said that there is nothing new under the sun. We tend to simply keep producing new versions of the same old thing every few years. That’s why books get separated into genres: first into fiction or nonfiction or poetry, then further categorized into historical romance or biography or free verse. Each one is like the one before. The stories are similar, the methods repeated, the same words borrowed and reused to express the same emotions and experiences.

But we keep reading, don’t we?

The original love story has been rewritten 1000 times over and we still welcome it in its myriad evolutions. Sure, we put away the truly mundane, the books with no heart, or bad dialogue, or an annoying tendency toward authorial interjection at the wrong moment. We put them away because we know we have many more, much better written, to choose from. We don’t put them away or cast any blame on them for borrowing from the original story; we just expect them to do it well.

Originality isn’t really what we want. Love, loss, growth, hurt, life, death: these are the universal factors of every person’s existence. We want those stories. We want those words. We want to hear ourselves, but a little bit different. We want to read someone completely different, but with just enough of ourselves that we can grab onto the similarity and expand into another kind of life.

It doesn’t matter if you are writing a shipwreck survivor novel or an article about Christmas decorations. If you want originality, the best thing to do is forget about it and just write with honesty and vigor.

Authors who write with originality as the foremost goal end up producing the literary equivalent of the teenager trying too hard to fit in. Somehow, the desperate expression of “Look at me! I’m an individual! I’m unique just like you!” becomes just another murmur of the mass-produced roar. The best way to be original is to quit trying so hard for it.

What do you think?

Make it a good day.

Image Credit: left_hand.