The Thursday! Newsletter 2-11: Let's Not Get Original!
Volume 2, Issue 11
How original do you feel today?
I ask because one of the things that's held up a few creative friends of mine is the feeling that their ideas aren't particularly original. Maybe you know how it goes: you have what seems a great idea for a story or what-have-you, you start to work it out, and you suddenly realize you're seen it before. Someone else wrote a story with the same plot. Someone else did a poster tribute to the same television show you like. Someone else wrote your song. You stop and berate yourself just a little bit and wonder if you'll ever have an original idea again.
I've heard the complaint, mostly from fellow writers, that the stories that comes to them are simply rehashes of stories others have done. They don't have anything original, which causes them to...push. They force things into their writing they would not otherwise push because they're convinced they have to be entirely fresh and original. Sometimes, they just quit altogether for a while. The discouragement gets so heavy on their hearts they can't write more than a couple sentences. To be perfectly honest, I've been there, especially with my poetry lately. I've been reading a whole bunch of poets whose work I find interesting -- Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Don Marquis, Emily Dickinson, Paul Dunbar -- and their poems sometimes creep in to my own. A lot. to the point where I'm pretty sure I'm writing the same poem I've already read, but in my own voice and style. It makes me wonder if I"m not doing it all wrong.
Then I think of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine".
You know the song, don't you? Sing a bit of it to yourself right now, Go ahead. If you're in public and don't think folks need to hear your mellifluous voice, sing it in your head. Just a few seconds.
Got it? Good. Now. Was your version fast and funky, slow and soulful, or bluesy? Which version of the song came to your mind? I ask because Grapevine (as I'll call it for brevity's sake) hit the Billboard Hot 100 charts at least three times, done three different ways by three very different bands. Gladys Knight and the Pips released it first in 1967 and took it to Number 2. Marvin Gaye took it all the way to Number 1 a year later. Both versions used most of the same musicians -- members of the Funk Brothers. In 1970, Creedence Clearwater Revival put it on their absolute banger of an album Cosmo's Factory. The single went to Number 43 six years later.
Same song but three entirely different versions. Which one did you think of just a couple of minutes ago?
This may seem simple and obvious, but I don't think we creative human beings remember the simple and obvious things all that well sometimes. "Covering" a song is a practice as old as song itself. A troubadour would roll into town, sing a song and another troubadour passing through would hear it, learn it, and perform it himself, with his own added flourishes. So long as they credited the original artist, no one had any problems (though sampling did cause some real issues, and still does). Same for movies. How many different version of A Star is Born have you seen? We blur lines all the time. Star Wars took a lot from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. In fact, you're seen the rough skeletons (or, sometimes more) of several Kurosawa films in other popular movies -- Seven Samurai inspired The Magnificent Seven, for instance. But Kurosawa's Ran was itself taken from Shakespeare's "King Lear".
Back to the music world, jazz musicians take riffs from each other all the time. A snippet of one chorus ends up in another song, transformed and added to. This happens over and over again because art is not as often original as it is transformative. Our copyright laws in the United Stated even (allegedly) account for this. If you borrow and transform, you are (in theory) on good ground. Stories are X + Y with a sprinkle of Z. How many stories can you think of adapted from old fairy tales or legends? How many myths become novels, thanks to a little transformation? How many musicians have said "Oh, I definitely had [some other song] in mind when I wrote this" and it's perfectly fine because they didn't just copy it.
Let's go back to Grapevine. If you listen to each of the three versions I mentioned, take note of how they differ. Listen to how the singers translated the music through themselves to make the song their very own, even though they didn't originally write nor perform it. As a bonus, go back and find Otis Redding's original version of "Respect", because Aretha Franklin's version is most definitely a cover.
The point I'm trying to make is that most of your ideas won't be original but it's okay. So long as you aren't making a direct copy of someone else's story, you can take the idea in your own direction, with your own characters and your own cool twists. Make improvements on what you've imagined. Play with point-of-view or give the story a different ending. Change the setting. Keep the core but transform everything else.
Here's an example from my own notes. I had an idea for a story about a goblin whose warren inside an old, abandoned Wizard's keep was raided by a group of "heroes" who rounded up most of the goblins, killed a few, and went about looting their meager possessions searching for a legendary treasure secured in the long-dead Wizard's study deep underground. The goblin used his knowledge of the keep and his craftiness to ambush the heroes, in ones and twos, discover the way they'd set to break into the Wizard's magical vault, sabotage it, and save the hostages, including his own spouse and children. Does that story seem kind of familiar? It ought to. It's Die Hard, more or less. I've not written it because it's not quite ready -- or I'm not quite ready to write something quite that long, more accurately -- but there it is, waiting. I sat on it for a bit because it seemed to much like the movie (which was based on a book, by the way). Over time, I added my own twists and turns. Though it is similar, it is not the same. Different setting. Different objectives. No Sgt. Al Powell and no Deputy Chief Dwayne Robinson. No FBI guys. But there might be underground monsters or a summoned hunter. You never know.
Right now, you have ideas that would make very cool works of art -- stories, songs, illustrations, posters, whatever -- and you've tucked them away because they seem to you like copies of something that's already out there. I'm asking you to pull them out of storage and see what magical transformations you can work on them to make them your own. Speed them up. Slow them down. Make them funky or soulful but always and ever yours.
Then show me what you've done. I want to see!
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What I Wrote Last Week
"Digital Dance Macabre", a poem about a problem of modernity.
"Happiness is...", a short poem about possibility.
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