The Impossible Goal of Originality
American culture is obsessed with originality, with the icon image of the individual summoning greatness from within themselves. To acknowledge the many influences and factors that contribute to an individual’s success make it lesser in the face of this image. This is what I used to think, but my own journey as a writer has fundamentally changed my view. Originality is an allusive goal that rarely leads anywhere.
When I first got serious about writing, around seventh grade, I thought my fantasy novel was astoundingly original. The protagonist’s magic held a whispering voice that coaxed him to relinquish control, to fully embrace the magic’s full destructive potential. One of the central conflicts of the novel was this battle for control. This idea is of course not original, but rather a well-worn trope. It appeared in my novel precisely because I had read it in other things. I knew this on some level. My true claim to fame was the invention of the voice. It was mine. When I discovered that even the voice was not original, but existed in many stories, it immediately lost value for me.
I went from masterful inventor to mere copycat.
I tried out new versions. The voice was a piece of a god. A demon. The voice was altering the protagonist’s memories, making it so he couldn’t really remember who he was. Everything had been done before and then done again. I devised other concepts, other stories, hoping to find that which was solely mine. Inevitably, I failed again and again. My stories, or so it seemed, were echoes of echoes.
I had to acknowledge that I wasn’t going to create some masterwork of originality. Value had to come from elsewhere. And, well, all I had was me. Accepting this I decided that all I needed was myself, that my unique perspective, my unique telling of already told stories, was inherently valuable. Or perhaps I read it on the internet somewhere. It is a commonly expressed sentiment and a good one, particularly if taken even further. That if you craft a story and get something from the final product that nothing else provides, then it has value. If anybody tells you differently, they are factually incorrect. At the same time, this uniqueness still privileges originality.
In deciding that a person’s unique perspective is what gives their work value, originality is still paramount with a work’s value coming from its newness. The books I read are entirely different. None of them stand all by themselves, solely cut off from all other books in existence. They interact, combining concepts and plots and characterizations. The more I read, the more it becomes obvious that so many books would not exist without the books that came before them. This is even the case for books credited with uniqueness like Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. In a talk I attended, Mandel said that the figuring of the apocalypse as not an ending, but rather a new beginning was heavily inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz. These connections don’t make books lesser, but richer. As authors pick up the same themes or concepts, each new version is able to probe further than any one story does and similar ideas can be read as being in dialogue with each other.
By holding originality above all else, I was denying myself this opportunity. For example, if I read a book with ‘a voice’, my sole thought would be, “Don’t worry. My work still has some value as created by me.” I missed an opportunity to learn. A richer thought process would have been, “What has the author accomplished here? What have they missed? What are they doing that is different from what I’m trying to do? What is the same? How can I learn from all this?” In this way, something similar to what I have created ceases to be an obstacle, but instead becomes a tool. My writing is not good in spite of what others have created but is good precisely because of all that has come before it.
This same principle applies to everything in life, whether it’s science, or athletics, or political actions, or the way you think about the world. The idea of a purely original thinker, someone who creates from only their own ingenuity and sheer willpower is nothing but a myth. A myth that allows those that cloak themselves in it to claim more power than they deserve and those that inevitably fall short to feel like impostors. The moment that you put a finger to keyboard, that you set aside to create, is a special time that can be all yours. However, it is only possible because of all that came before that you are building upon. What you create isn’t special because it stands alone, but because it stands with so many.
