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The Myth of Originality

Lately I've been concerning myself with figuring out what my "style" is when it comes to writing fiction. I love science fiction. I love horror. I love fantasy, especially with the recent emergence of "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim", and "Game of Thrones" on HBO. I love writing stuff like this as much as I love reading, watching, and playing it.

Yet, I can't seem to shake the feeling that I'm cheating myself by sticking to those genres. I wish I were a good enough writer to write something beautiful about something mundane. Not that this world is mundane, I just wish it took more than something fantastical to entice me to write anything. I wish I could just sit down in front of my computer and write anything, anything at all, and be satisfied with it.

The thing is, everyone I talk to about this responds as if they've done so a hundred times before to a hundred other people: write what makes you want to write. Nothing else matters.


One of my classes had me read a book tonight called Uncreative Writing, which argues that uncreativity, unoriginality, and even plagiarism is a good thing.

I like that idea. I remember a short story I wrote for a creative writing class over a year ago about a woman who gets displaced in time because of a corporately-funded scientific experiment. There's a character from the same company who follows her to her chronological destination out of a sense of personal guilt. This character was British. One of my classmates sarcastically replied, "so this is a Doctor Who fanfiction, right? No?"

As a matter of fact that connection hadn't crossed my mind while I was writing it. I admit that I now see the similarities; the character is British, and traveled through time once. In every other conceivable way my character was a different man than the Doctor from the venerated sci-fi show.

More importantly though, who cares? "Doctor Who" is a show about a time-travelling eccentric with a British accent, but the concept of time travel or being displaced in time didn't start with the show. H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, the template from which most modern time-travel stories, including "Doctor Who", form new content through new context. Even earlier instances are seen in Hindu, Japanese, and even Hebrew myths. Hell, Wells' Time Machine even had a sequel published in 1979...written by a different author. I know it seems a bit obvious, since Wells has been dead for decades, but his story, not just the concept but the story itself, was picked up and continued by the mind of another writer because he wanted the story to continue.

I think lots of writers despair about their perceived unoriginality at some point. Maybe some people never stop doing it. Either way, writing is simply stealing. Writers steal things that happen in the real world. Writers steal semantic concepts in order to build upon them or destroy them. Plus "The Simpsons" have already done pretty much everything, so originality is just about extinct anyway.

I leave you with this inspiring bit of text I got from Google images, containing words taken without permission from Jim Jarmusch, in order to convey my point in a way I wouldn't be able to do otherwise:



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