How to be Original

"Good Artists Copy. Great Artists Steal"
-- Viet Nguyen

Where Good Ideas go off to Die

It took me a long time to figure out what to write about next in my blog. I figured that it would be better to think up of something fresh and original. Instead I found myself circling back, doubting myself, and second guessing all my ideas.

"If I write about subject X," I reasoned to myself, "people would expose me as a hack the second they do a simple google search!"

And in that fear of being "unoriginal," all my ideas had gone off to die, alone, unexplored and unfinished.

Nothing New Under The Sun

I came to the realization that most of the content I consume-- music, television programs, movies, etc. All tend to follow similar threads. Most popular music tends to use the same 3 or 4 chords. Television sitcoms tend to have people trying to live/work with each other, despite clashing personalities. And usually there's some sort of romance arc where one of the male protagonists pines over one of the female characters and it doesn't get resolved until the end of the series. And with movies, it seems that every single superhero origin story has to involve the hero being orphaned young, going through some sort of catharsis, learning how to use their powers, and then finally overcoming some sort of shortcoming to defeat the villain at the end.

Bonus points if you can allude to the hero being some sort of Space Jesus

Formulaic? Yes. But in the end everyone wants to hear, read, or see something that's familiar and comfortable to them. People want to root for the good guy and see how the bad guy meets his come-uppance. Many complain that the entertainment industry has run out of ideas and that the industry needs to come up with something new. In reality, the most popular movies are the ones with the same basic characters and the same basic plot points. All hollywood is doing is swapping around the names of the characters and changing the setting of the story.

Lets add lasers shooting into the sky because why the heck not?

But is this really a problem? I would argue no. Despite the 6-7 different types of plot lines that have been established, there is still a wonderful amount of variety among these stories. All the common tropes you see in all these movies are simply following the rules of storytelling. These plot lines simply provide the structure that holds up the film. It gives the characters something to do, and as the movie progresses, you get an opportunity to learn about these characters and grow to love them.

This is much the same as the english language. You only have 26 letters, and there is a relatively strict set of grammar and syntax rules that you have to follow in order for these words to make sense. But with just these 26 letters and grammar rules, there is a virtually limitless variety of stories that can be written.

Standing On The Shoulders of Giants

So what are we to do? The first thing we need to do is to recognize that its very VERY difficult to come up with something that is both great and original. Most never come up with anything that hasn't ever been said or written before. The ones who invent truly original things are extremely rare.

Inventing rounded corners, for example

This doesn't mean we can't come up with anything original, by the way. But we have to simply accept that fact that whatever we've come up with has probably been though up of before and has already been implemented several times in the past. The faster we can accept this fact, the better we are for it. But that should not discourage us from still using those idea anyways and implementing them in our own way.

"Great Artists" do this all the time. George Lucas, for example, was really interested in old serials like Buck Rogers and Japanese period pieces.

He basically stole the characters and the story from the classic Japanese movie, "The Hidden Fortress" and changed the setting to a "Buck Rogers" style space adventure and BOOM! That's how Star Wars was created. Even part of the term for the Japanese period piece, "Jidai" was included in his movie as the term "Jedi." 

In music, people who are considered legends blatantly stole their material from earlier artists. Eric Clapton made his name modernizing old Robert Johnson songs. Led Zeppelin did the same thing with several old blues standards.

R&D: Ripoff and Duplicate

Instead of trying to come up with something completely original, you should take time to study works of art that you already really like. What did you really like about that work? What do you think you can use in your own creations? What do you think you could improve? 

If you want to become a better public speaker, for example, you can fire up youtube and watch videos of public speakers you like. You can go through hours of Tony Robbins presentations or TED talks in order to see how well these speakers communicate. You can see what they do to pique the interest of their audience, how they convey to their points to the audience, and lastly how they motivate their audience to action. It doesn't matter what Tony Robbins is trying to convince you to do-- you're merely trying to study his methods, steal his tricks and ultimately integrate those tricks into your own skill set. 

Obviously there's a difference between paying "homage" to someone else work and blatant plagiarism. I would never encourage anyone to copy someone else's work, word for word, and then try to pass it off as their own. But taking something and presenting it in a new and unique way is totally acceptable. I consider the music teacher at this school to be ridiculously creative and amazing, even though he's just covering some old Zeppelin songs:

The difference here is that you are pulling from everything that you really like and smashing it together with something else and creating something new and original. Others may come up with  similar concepts to yours,  but they will never be able to replicate your same exact sensibilities. 

So yes there aren't that many truly original ideas out there. there's maybe a half dozen different narratives that we see over and over again. But don't let that discourage you; your unique personality and way of expressing yourself is what will make your work original. And if you're lucky, someone else will look back at your work and will cite and imitate you as one of their influences. 

It is the greatest form of flattery, after all.