There’s a big problem in my line of work. And that is the desire to be original. I felt it much more keenly when I was in bands, but it’s very much present in my writing, and to a lesser extent, blogging.
It is inevitable that I cannot have a truly original thought. Occasionally, I may formulate that thought in a way that hasn’t been expressed to others, or change an established thought enough to consider it my own, but still, how original (or not) I am vexes me enormously.
Sometimes, being unoriginal is necessary. Sometimes, having access to all the others in your field is beneficial — a shortcut, at worst. But still.… It’s not that I want to be original for it’s own sake — I’m often quite pleased that I came up with the same idea as someone else. And, I hope, I’m one of those people who would admit it when they weren’t the first.… Maybe it’s the latent scientist in me — given the same stimulus two similar but different people come up with something broadly the same.
The main problem with that argument, of course, is that the ‘other’ person invariably tends to be much more successful than me. If successful is defined by owning, or at least having a better claim on, the copyright [grin].
It’s one of the reasons I like crime fiction. There must be huge pressures on writers to come up with ‘novel’ heroes and plots, yet the vast majority of the audience couldn’t give two figs as long as the execution was competent. I don’t have a problem with a middle-aged, alcoholic, maverick detective breaking the rules and solving the case.
I suspect it’s a lot worse for editors. Package after package of similarities. You start looking for difference because you’ve forgotten what talent is.
Maybe. I have no idea. It’s how I imagine fashion. One thing I’ve never understood is why fashion matters. Or, if I’m brutally honest, why heritage matters. Not history, heritage. You can not, physically, ever be in the past. So… surely the effort should be on bringing the past to life. Not on preserving things for tourists. Would it not be better to hire Brian Blessed and buy some acid to distribute?
Which perhaps returns to a familiar theme of mine — the individual vs society. But that, dear reader, is for another day. Or — who knows — maybe even the novels I am supposed to be writing.
The origin of idiots
Why do people write? I’ve never understood. Not fully. Not the compulsive act. I can understand the desire to tell stories, to entertain, to inform, to educate even.…
But why write it down? As a younger idiot, I enjoyed the physical act of writing. I still do, to an extent, although my handwriting is less mannered and neat than it once was. I remember being told off by one of my English teachers when I was 14 for having feminine hand-writing.
I’ve always loved putting one word in front of another, playing with sentence construction and how things look on a page. It’s only recently that I’ve stopped writing in eternally nested parentheses. But that may be because I am more tired than usual. I find that the more alert I am, the less likely I am to focus. I even had a boss once who said she preferred to manage me when I was hungover.….
Anyhoo, I digress, as I am prone to do. The written word to me has always been a private pleasure. I’ve corresponded with people (mainly girls, to be fair) since I was eleven years old. I would (and still do) put myself in their shoes, and try and imagine what was funny and what was not. In terms of subject matter, I would try to bring in little touches that made it personal, even though I was mainly amusing myself.
So, some people would receive stories with rabbits, others would have thinly veiled heroes or key concepts that related to them.
Yet I have no compulsion to write. It’s a game to me. I love to play with words. I like entertaining people, but I know, at heart, that I lose them somewhere along the way. My enthusiasm for what I do sometimes outweighs my judgement. Sometimes outweighs my talent.
La. La.
