Originality

My girlfriend, Mica, and I have a game where we try to lay out the influences of stories that we like, or stories that we’ve written, as a sort of ingredient list. Take Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, for example: it centers on the kinds of questions about what makes someone a human that you get from science fiction, but instead of getting there through spaceships and robots, the first half seems more like an uptight English bildungsroman from the Victorian era. That’s one of the great things about dating another writer: we get free reign to talk about all these esoteric questions with limited appeal to anyone else. Because I don’t think I’ve seen another writer who doesn’t obsess over what inspired them.

Often, that obsession is self-affirming. There’s the same thrill of sorting yourself into a genre or claiming your writing tradition from some master of the craft as there is in getting your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator score. It affirms your authenticity in the craft, your uniqueness, but without leaving you entirely out on your own. It turns your writing from something you do in private, scribbling bits that might not ever be read again, into something part of a larger tradition, something with weight behind it. I’ve been saying “you” a lot here, but mostly I’m just listing my own experience, gaining confidence as a writer by imitating who I knew were respected and admired. In general, I don’t think there should be any shame in this sort of imitation. Walk through any art museum on a busy day and you’ll see students on benches with sketchbooks on their laps, copying the greats. Why shouldn’t writers do the same?

Sometimes, though, I get scared that this imitation is all that there is. I’ve gotten hooked on the website TV Tropes over the past month, which defines common elements (character archetypes, plots, settings, etc.) and lists works that use them. It’s mostly fun to look around at different stories I recognize and see how they all sprout from the same structure, like pulling back the curtain to reveal the mechanisms of my favorite stories. But pulling back the curtain can be disappointing too, especially when so many stories seem the same. Spend too long in that way of thinking, and it begins to feel like nothing can really be unique. If a character seems new, it isn’t something entirely original, but rather a subversion of a trope, or two tropes melded together. From the TV Tropes perspective, writing begins to look like building with Legos: maybe what you make is original, but it’s never really true art because the pieces were made by someone else. My first day at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio my class read the short story “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. At first it confused me: a hodgepodge of clichés, none of which mixed quite right. But, as we discussed it, I realized that this was the point, that Wolff was arguing that nothing was original anymore, but you can still find beauty by combining what no one else has thought to combine yet. I was proud of myself at first, but as soon as I shared my theory and got an approving nod from the teacher, I felt suddenly disappointed. The secret to being a great writer, it seemed, was to quit trying and settle for being a plagiarizer with a unique talent for hiding who you stole from.

I don’t think it’s that extreme anymore, but the problem is still with me. Over fall break I’ve tried to come up with a plan to revise a novel I’ve been working on since Junior year of high school. All my past drafts were disappointing, so I tried to cut without mercy and replace it with new parts that I thought were sure to work. But that turned out disappointing too, because I ended up cutting what was most original in the story, and everything that I replaced it with, I’d stolen from somewhere else.

I think that knowing how much writers borrow from their colleagues is pretty important, especially for new writers. For one thing, it underlines the importance of reading widely, and it cuts through blanket respect of mythic writers too. But it only goes so far. Because we have other sources to draw from, sources that are never as simple as tropes. There’s non-fiction history for one, and your own life for another. That was Mica’s big innovation in our game: when talking about her own stories, she listed memories with her family as ingredients alongside her favorite books and films. And this injection of the personal, I think, is what keeps fiction from becoming repetitive. Take high fantasy, for instance, maybe the genre that borrows the most from others because it’s completely separate from our own world. At it’s worst it’s nothing but mimicry: the dungeons and elves and orcs and taverns that Tolkien codified and imitators and Dungeons & Dragons and video games reinforced over and over and over again. But in any decent game of D&D you’ll see characters drawn from personal experience and flourishing webs of inside jokes that could only have come from real life. Oddly, some Dungeon Masters try to keep their game-worlds pure by banning anything that doesn’t jive with the pre-established gameworld. But, in my view, the personal and new cutting through the caked-on layers of tradition is what fiction is really about.