An Alphabet of Better Writing # O

O is for...Originality

Some people claim that there are only seven basic plots, or four, or that all the great stories have been written and that the novel is dead in any case.  If you listen to all of that, you may as well put your pencil back in its case/shut down your computer right now. All is not lost, however: in the words of jazz musicians Melvyn Oliver and James Young, it ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it...

It's easy to tie yourself into literary knots in the quest for originality, straining after increasingly fantastical stories and more fractured and convoluted ways of telling them, but I suspect the answer may be simpler than that.  What makes your work original is that it is written by you (this is also a potent argument against plagiarism -- just don't go there, unless you stringently and respectfully acknowledge your sources).  What marks it out from the work of any other writer, is that you will have brought your own experience and vision of the world to bear upon the writing of it.  French winemakers have a word for it: terroir.  This is the effect that climate and geology have upon their precious grapes -- a pinot noir grown on one slope will be immeasurably different from one grown a little further down the field.

It's the same with writers. You will bring your experience of love, loss, betrayal, redemption, or any of the endlessly engrossing themes of literature to bear upon the story you are telling.  Your insight into the workings of jealousy will be different from mine, the story you will write about it will be a world apart from the one I might attempt.

If originality is something which exercises you, then rather than groping for new stories to tell, you could use your time much more productively in developing your own voice.  This is a process of distillation that involves drafting and redrafting -- an Olympian authorial fitness plan of editing, reading, listening and thinking.  There's plenty of precedent for telling old stories in a new way -- think Chaucer, think Shakespeare, get writing...