Once upon a time I was obsessed with the idea of originality. As a young writer I worked hard to craft stories that had a new or unexplored twist on things. But as I got older, and came into contact with more stories, I found that most often other better writers had already explored those ideas well before I had even conceived of them.

It made me feel cheap at first, as if I was somehow stealing something. That if I didn’t blaze a path unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, that I wasn’t a “real” writer. As if it somehow cheapened my creativity.

But I’ve been writing and thinking about stories for a while now, and I’ve come to realize that chasing after something “original” was a waste of time. There are seven billion people on this planet right now, and thousands of years of history behind us. And between all those brains over all the world and through all of those years, I believe it’s safe to say that we’ve already thunk most of the thinks that we can think.

And at first that discouraged me. Because if everything that can be thought has been thought, if every story-line and trope has been used and forgotten and found again more times than we can imagine, then what is the point of telling stories at all?

Then I saw Flash Gordon.

Yeah, the old one. The one that came out in ten minute serialized segments in theaters each week.

And as I was watching I realized that the the plot of the serial was about a band of rebels and misfits teaming together to fight against an evil empire with a moon that they could move around and blow up planets with.

It sort of sounds like Star Wars, doesn’t it?

And it’s not just the broad strokes that Star Wars lifts from these old serials. There are so many elements that George Lucas borrowed from other places you’d be better off listing off things that weren’t cribbed from somewhere else.

The idiosyncratic numbering system, starting with Episode IV and the opening crawl explaining the story so far? That was directly referencing those old serial adventures. The pod race in Episode I? It’s a beat for beat ripoff of the chariot race in Ben Hur. Howard Hawks’ Air Force provided the exact composition for the ship-to-ship fight as the Millennium Falcon is escaping from the Death Star. The list goes on and on.

Tarantino films are famous for being chock full of references and homages to other films. And it’s not like these directors are trying to hide anything from us. They’re not trying to fool us into thinking that the ideas they’re borrowing were theirs and only theirs. All great artists build their work out of the pieces of the works that came before them.

Which raises the question, where is the creativity in all of this? After all, anyone can steal an idea, right? But the true test of creativity is not found in coming up with original ideas, but rather in executing the ideas you’ve stolen in a new way.

Star Wars wasn’t revolutionary because no one had ever thought of a moon-sized battle-station that could blow up other planets before. It was revolutionary because of how George Lucas brought that idea to life.

In the artistic world there is a thread that weaves through most conversations about creativity: it’s the idea of voice. Voice isn’t something that’s easy to define, and it’s even harder to develop. But at its core voice is about you. Who you are, what you love, what you hate, how you think. And it’s fascinating if only because it is so hard for artists to find. Writers and painters and filmmakers all have to figure out how to get out of their own way, to put aside their fear and self-doubt, and put a piece of themselves into the work they’re doing.

Because there are no new ideas left. All the stories have been told. All the colors have been used.

The only truly original thing left in the world, is you.