Originality is Overrated

My latest kick has been complaining to anyone who will listen that there’s no originality anymore.  I glare at them through my thick black frames, over a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and whine that “it’s so cliché.”  …Okay, not exactly, but I’m sure that’s how I seem to people who tell me “You know, there’s no such thing as originality.”

And they’re right.  There are only seven different plotlines in the world if you ask a writer.  There’s only one if you ask Joseph Campbell.  By the same token, striving for originality as your only goal leads to disaster.  I should know.  I was a film student* and I had to sit through quite a few films that were essentially “let’s expose a filmstrip to a slab of concrete for twenty minutes and call it art.”  Was that original?  Yeah, I guess.  Was it art?**  Or, for a better question, is it something that people can genuinely enjoy and identify with?  Nnnnot so much.



So, I gave it some more thought, and I realized what bothers me about these TV shows and movies that are derivative collections of memes and references or plain old stereotypes is that they seem to lack effort.  The problem isn’t that I’ve seen some of their content before.  The problem is that it’s presented with the attitude of “Here, it’s ‘The Hangover 2.’  Now don’t bother me again.”  It’s lazy.  It’s much harder to put thought and effort into the plotting and execution to create something with which people will WANT to engage.

The secret then, isn’t trying to be original.  It’s doing what you want and putting your heart into it.  Recycle that plotline, but breathe new life into your characters.  Have a reason for your plot twists other than “it was random and therefore funny.”  Think!  Take those flattened icons and give them new depth.  If anyone can do this, it’s us progeeks.  We are united by the fact that we still give a damn.***

Therefore, go on and do what you want to do.  Make your romantic comedies and snickering music videos critiques.  Enjoy creating with a full palette, and yes, that can include references to productions that came before.  Just, please, do it like you mean it.

*Which explains my black beret and thick-framed glasses, naturally.
**My professor seemed to think so, and to argue with him on this point would inevitably come to a duel of lightsabres at sunrise.
***Am I allowed to say “damn” ?  Is everyone here over 18?

-Tamara Hecht

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a5823410970b www.genjipress.com

    I’m going to go out on a limb here and disagree, but I’ll try to do it in a friendly way. Maybe I won’t even be disagreeing, but simply stating your premise from another direction.
    The old bit about there being only seven (or twelve, or fifty-one) stories — you know who made that up? We did. We made up the whole idea of a story in the first place, and along with it how many stories there were supposed to be.
    There are as many or as few stories as you want in the world. It’s all about your expectations and your insight. If you think there are only seven stories, then you’re going to find a way to slot every story you see into those seven. I had a teacher in high school who had boiled it down to three: Man Against God, Man Against Nature, Man Against Himself. When I pointed out that “Watership Down” was Nature Against Nature (if you wanted to get technical about it), he got testy. That was my first hint something about the whole there-are-only-X-number-of-stories-in-the-universe-so-deal-already exercise seemed rather forced.
    But that aside — yes, what’s original is execution. How you put the pieces together and what symphony you make out of them is more the issue than whether or not you can come up with some really killer-diller plot contrivance.
    And the best way to make those things come together in an original way, if you ask me, is to dig into your own experience. Because nobody in the world has see what you have seen in exactly the way you have seen it, and that’s indispensible even if it seems totally trivial right now.

  • http://www.megamistudios.com Rob

    It’s funny you mention all of this. I was going to hit it from a different direction within the next few days in my article series. Stay tuned to see what I concoct. ^_^

  • http://profile.typepad.com/tamara126 Tamara Hecht

    Ooh, well said. I like that. I got the seven story types from a high school teacher as well, but I accepted the notion because, well, it seemed true.
    Then again, even those don’t completely hold true because they only apply to goal-driven stories (as opposed to “character sketches” or slice-of-life stories). Anyway, good point about my take on a story being different from yours or the next person’s. And, interestingly, if we all took that same story and made it our way, and then showed them to one another, we’d have exponentially more stories because the interpretations will be different and beget yet different stories… okay, point. Boiling stories down is looking at them backwards. It doesn’t matter where they come from. Where are they going?