This morning, as I sat outside of my first Lit class of the day, I happened to be approached by my Creative Writing teacher from last semesters, who I built a close friendship to over the course of our time together, and we had a little chat. Well, eventually we got around to the subject of originality, since he is delving into screenwriting right now, and let's face it, there's just not a whole lot of originality to be had.
Now, we've all heard, I'm sure, the saying that there is no such thing as a new story. "There is only one story," some wise author once wrote in a book. It makes complete sense, and I can't say I disagree. They all have the same premise, and they all have the same goal.
But that's not the only thing I mean when I say that originality is hard to find. Have you ever been walking through the bookstore, browsing the shelves of your favorite genre, and you pick up a book you've never seen before, and you read the jacket...and it sounds exactly like the manuscript you have at home, waiting for submission? Yeah, that's the worst. It's never happened to me, but I did once get an email from a reader, saying that she had just seen a book online that sounded just like my second novel, Anti-Boys.
Striving to find new, unique ideas is something that every artist in the world struggles with every day when they sit down to work. We've heard it all before: boy meets girl, vampires, aliens, superheroes, CIA agent, serial killer, wizard, elf, fairy, movie star, parent, teen, widow, sibling, sisterhood, brotherhood. It's all been done, and it's been successful because we all love it.
What do you think?
xoxo,
Vicky B
1 comments:
Yeah, this is so true.
We, as writers, always try to be different. We want our story to blow people's mind away, we want to write something no one else has written.
But there are only so many ideas in the world, only a number of themes you can write on.
So our work can never be completely unique.
Which is pretty sad if you think about it :P
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