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PENI GRIFFIN

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Mar04 Literary Synchronicity
Feb04 The Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors... They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a concept.'
Sep03 Preaching to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic

on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...

The Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
by Peni Griffin

This is of course untrue. It is evident from their own statements that the two men are like-minded friends who discuss their work and therefore influence each other; but you're not going to confuse one with the other (well, not unless they want you to). Besides, one story is horror and the other is comic fantasy - how alike could they realistically be? All the same, a level exists at which my hypnopompic critical judgement is dead on. The high concept of each book is identical - A brave young girl rescues her family from a supernatural woman who rules a malleable, dreamlike realm. The two authors use identical imagery (the other mother's doughy simulacra = the Queen's doughy, dream-manipulating dromes; both forests contain unfinished trees) and similar stock characters (the old women who advise the heroines, the magical animals who assist them). If you have a "compare and contrast" essay hanging over your head, you can't do better than to write it on these two books - they're fast reads with points of comparison and/or contrast throughout, and the professor hasn't heard it all 1,000 times before.

I have, thank goodness, left the necessity of grinding out papers to please professors far behind (my advice is to amuse them as much as possible), and that sort of thing is not what I'm here to do, but the case opens a door to a much larger question, to whit: How is it possible for two stories to be different when their plots are identical? If one story is original, isn't the other automatically imitative?

You can waste a lot of time talking about undefined terms, so my first stop was the Funk and Wagnall's dictionary in my office. Here "originality" is defined as "The power of originating; inventiveness" and as "the quality of being original or novel." Looking up "original," I find: "Of or belonging to the beginning, origin, or first stage of existence of a thing," "immediately produced by one's own mind and thought; not copied or produced by imitation;" "able to produce works requiring thought, without copying or imitating those of others; creative; inventive."

So far, so good. As anyone in the patent office could tell you, it is not necessary to have a brand-spanking new idea completely unlike any ever had before in order to be creative and inventive. If it were, the patent office wouldn't be a necessary institution, because in most fields the first stage of existence is long past. Even relatively recent media, such as comic books, started life standing on the shoulders of giants.

Artists in general are frank about this. Agatha Christie, that premier example of sheer plot-based ingenuity, famously said that she only had five plots, yet she continues to fool her audience, and dead fairly, too, long after we think we've learned all her tricks. Picture book authors re-tell traditional stories ad infinitum. Every genre, every audience, possesses a stock of motifs, images, themes, and character types on which to draw. We work within established structures, genres, and narrative conventions; or we deliberately rebel against them. It's very much like being human. No matter how differently we develop them, we all start from a baseline set of experiences, which we cannot lose and retain our species identity.

If one works within a tradition - modern fantasy, for example - it may be difficult for the author, much less the reader, to tell whether a particular work is immediately produced by one's own mind and thought rather than copied or produced by imitation. To take an obvious case: we can start with the assumption that Tolkien used northern European sources in an original way; but since every fantasy author in the English language has been influenced by Tolkien since at least the 1960s, how do we sort out "Tolkien imitators" from "Tolkien successors?" We only need to look at the bookshelves to realize that certain elements of Tolkien have become part of the stock toolset - the trilogy format, the maps, the detailed world-building game, etc. Sometimes these elements are used badly, sometimes they are used well. But how can we be sure that they are used "originally?"

Although it's common to denigrate works one doesn't like as "unoriginal" and praise those one likes as "original," it is plain from the success of derivative works through the years (naming no names) that many people enjoy lack of originality either all the time or under certain conditions. If you're a child just learning the conventions of narrative, or an adult sitting in the waiting room while a loved one undergoes surgery, the last thing you may want is someone making demands on you by being original all over your reading matter. Originality is a virtue; but it is only one among many, and no work will have every virtue in the literary canon; nor will every virtue be appropriate to every work. If you're hired to write a Harlequin romance or a Nancy Drew mystery - imitate, imitate, imitate!

Originality is also awkward to recognize simply because every book is somebody's first. Children in particular are forever getting works in the wrong order. To a child who has never read a Victorian novel, the parodic use of cliches in Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase or "Lemony Snicket's" Series of Unfortunate Events may be invisible behind the drama of disaster, bleak orphanages, hairbreadth escapes, etc. The first mystery is invariably baffling, the first romance affecting, the first story hinging on winning "the big game" suspenseful. When we grow older, we may even encounter the originals which influenced such works and heap scorn on them because we have learned to recognize the cliches, but are not quite sophisticated enough to know "the real thing" when we see it. Some people increase their literary acumen and grow out of this sort of judgement, while others never get over it.

I think what I'm getting at here is that, at the casual reader's level, the problem is unimportant. You like what you like. At the critical level, reviewers, librarians, and critics should have a large enough mental database of literature to recognize influences and make appropriate judgements; and until they acquire this experience, no one can teach them. Insofar as there is an originality problem, it belongs to creators, and it is not a problem that is ever fully solved. We have all read authors who started strong and ended by imitating their younger selves. There but for the grace of - well, actually,there's no grace for writers. We're on our own.

Buried somewhere in a closet or my attic is the first blank book I was ever given. (People love giving authors fancy blank books. I use mine for diaries.) It had a dustjacket with inspirational quotes, the most significant to me being someone-or-other's declaration that originality consisted, not of saying something never said before, but of saying exactly what you think yourself. The wisdom of this observation struck me when I was 12, and I have adhered to the principle ever since, with mixed results. This is the level at which originality happens; at which Gaiman's and Pratchett's identical plots and shared images diverge into two different stories.

And here's the big secret: Anyone can do it. It's as natural as writing.

When I do a presentation for children at the younger range of my readership, we usually build a collaborative plot outline, beginning by tossing a coin to determine the gender of our protagonist and working from there. Partly because I have no talent for controlling large numbers of children, this quickly spawns a dozen or more possible plots, some pedestrian, some quirky, once in awhile humblingly brilliant. Sometimes we wind up with parallel plots; sometimes disagreement arises spontaneously about how to handle the single plot we attempt to follow; invariably, toward the end of the session, I have ample lead-in to say to the kids that, if they all went home and wrote the story according to the work we had done, every one of them would write a different story.

Of course, in any given class of 9-year-olds, many stories, though unique in the class, will visibly imitate some admired work. Partly this is an attempt to work within "the rules" of what a story "ought to be" like; partly it's only to be expected in a setting where the teachers (I think sincerely) try to encourage originality but the system and society punish it savagely. But the point remains - the stories will be as individual as the children are, or dare to be. The seed is there in all of us.

It's hard work to find out what's in your own head and see what you really see instead of what you've been trained to see, and then to express it in a way that will prove acceptable to the cruel critics with which we all feel surrounded. It requires, at minimum, confidence in the proposition that what you can produce out of your own heart, mind, and experience will be superior to what you could produce out of somebody else's; a confidence which our innate social sense does little to bolster.

But you've got to start somewhere.

NOVEMBER 2003 © Peni Griffin

Editor: Michael Thorn
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