Originality

Today I had a surprising amount of people independently ask me for writing advice, and it kind of put me in the mood to talk about writing. I noticed back in a few of my older posts I referred to the idea of “paint-by-numbers originality”, and I figured I should take a quick break from the game design stuff write a short post explaining that idea further.

Originality is a good thing. It helps our work stand out from its competitors as well as appeal to an entirely unique assortment of people. It’s also something that comes naturally to us - since each one of us, by definition, is pretty original. We have experiences and views that no other person has, and can reflect on and explain things that a way that is unique to us, personally.

However, at some point the concept of originality in fiction shifted. Originality became less about the ability to reflect on things and more about what was being reflected on. The act of depicting a foreign alien species in science fiction, for example, became less about exploring how humans would interact with something completely unfamiliar and more about showing an alien species that simply hadn’t been shown before.

Pictured above: an Extremely Original alien design I did for a comic I was working on back in high school. Fucker can’t even keep his organs on the inside like we do! I was quite satisfied with my originality.

In retrospect, though, consider what a strangely masturbatory behavior that sort of originality is. When we think about originality, our mind often goes straight to the subjects of a work: have characters like this been written before? Has a setting functionally similar to this been depicted? An original creature or setting is something children can create simply by virtue of having less actual experience to draw on, yet as creators we view it as something worthy of praise. We also completely ignore the idea of how our originality comes across to others. Creators often praise eachother’s characters and settings for their originality, yet from everything I’ve seen the average consumer doesn’t actually perceive this type of originality as having any impact on the quality of a work. I myself remember being at that phase, where I would explain my detailed and super-original setting and creature ideas to people and be confused at why they just seemed bored. I was being original with my fiction, wasn’t that a good thing?

Mary Shelley is sometimes referred to as the creator of science fiction, which gives a kind of interesting angle to this. Frankenstein was not written with the intent of exhibiting originality and new ideas; it was written because four friends decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. Shelley chose her ideas because she wanted to elicit a reaction of introspective fear from her readers that her friends could not; her originality emerged as a tool for the purpose of outcompeting her friends. And I’m left wondering, when did we lose that? When did originality become an attribute worthy for praise, rather than a tool to be judged by its effectiveness to an end?

I guess it’s kind of funny to talk about originality considering I’m basically a fanfiction author. I became one sort of by accident, though. Like, I had always looked down on fanfiction as the byproduct of individuals too creatively devoid to come up with their own setting and characters - and I had put inordinate amounts of work into my own Completely Original pet projects.

At some point, however, after playing way too much TES4:Oblivion, taking too many psychology courses, and having too many friends going through hard times, I found myself saying “I think there’s a story here”, and I started to write it. As my work became better known, I started to read more fanfiction by other people, and I found that a lot of it was actually pretty good. But more disturbingly, I found that it was starting to make a lot of my old Completely Original ideas start looking pretty damn unoriginal.

The more fanfiction I read, the more I started to rethink my earlier interpretations of originality. I think it’s kind of a psychological thing with how, as creators, we are taught to perceive originality. In our eyes, it is often a switch: an element of a story is either original or it’s not. We want a certain amount of “originality” in the things we create, and in pursuit of that goal we try to have an adequate quantity of “Original Things”. Sci-fi/fantasy authors are usually going to hit the easy ones first: we’ll come up with a planet with its own geography, we’ll make a character who has a unique combination of character traits and attributes, we’ll name our elves something new and Original like “El'fa'a”, and so on. We garner enough originality points that we can feel good about our work, ignoring the fact that we’re garnering that originality by doing easy things that even a child can do.

But what does a fanfiction author do? When you’re writing some self-insert fanfic about your super special character falling in love with Harry Potter, you already have a world, characters, and elf-name given to you. How do you score enough originality to stand out from your four thousand peers who have done the same thing?

The answer: you add originality in original places. You do the weird shit. You use themes and tones atypical to the setting. You write in styles and angles people haven’t seen before. You infuse your bizarre personal experiences that probably have no place in the Harry Potter universe, and you structure the plot in ways that would make your literature teacher cringe. And it’s amazing! I discovered that these people, having the simplest approaches to originality taken away from them, often found new ones!

I mean, sure, anyone who writes can put originality in original places the same way these fanfiction authors do. You could make an original setting with original themes and an original plot structure and everyone would probably love it. But in general, we don’t. We bore our readers by confining our originality to the most conventional areas and most of the time we can’t even tell we’re doing it. Even today, when I try to come up with an original setting for something, I inevitably find myself renaming elves in an attempt to make it more original, despite knowing full well how stupid that is. It is very ingrained.

I guess if I had to take one moral from this, it’s that I wish I had written fanfiction sooner. I wish I had stopped wasting time working on original settings that would only get thrown away a year later every time as I realized how terrible they were and instead endeavored to comment on and modify things I had enjoyed. I wish I had spent more time working under constraints that forced me to think of originality itself in original ways, and learned how to judge originality the same way the average reader does. I didn’t, and now I feel like I’m playing catch-up. I spent too much of my life thinking I knew what originality was, and not enough exploring what originality could be.

Maybe originality is writing a post about being original that ends with the advice “write fanifiction”.