Before we start, I would like to show you We All Have Secrets. It's like PostSecret (which I adore), only a little different.
Today someone said that the only books I like are unoriginal. This is absolutely true. However, they had this negative connotation of unoriginal, and that doesn't make any sense to me. Everything about me is completely unoriginal, yet I still find a way to like myself. The clothes I wear are unoriginal and mass produced, the hairstyle shared with thousands, the books I like, depending on which ones, are shared with millions. I have nothing original around me, and I'm fine with that. I think there's this overwhelming desire to consider anything original to be good, that we lose the beauty of having something completely unoriginal done very well. I can go to school and read the same book that every other kid in America has to read, and I can still love it. I can love watching the same movie over and over the same way I can love talking to the same people over and over. If the book is good, and the movie is good, and the people are interesting, then what is there stopping me from enjoying it? We've had enough people on the planet who have had some inclination to create things that there's almost nothing original out there. Everything has been tried before, but it's a little bit different every time, and that's why it's interesting.
On the other hand, origionality does have it's values. I could write a completly origional novel about the Glaggeden, a group of creatures that live on a star. They live on a star because no other authors think of writing about creatures that live on a ball of firey gas. These creatures can not talk, because all those other novels have talking creatures. They can not have internal conflict, because all those other novels have internal conflict. They can not have a war with some sort of other creatures, because all those other novels are about war. In fact, because literature has an overabundance of characters that are creatures, I am considering of making them into plants instead. We have an award winning novel coming up as soon as I can figure out what happens in it.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Posted by Samantha at 4:49 PM
Labels: Books, Manifesto, Writing/Nanowrimo
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13 Fab Fans:
Originality is not what makes greatness; it is the original combination of unoriginal components to form a new whole.
Not a single gene in your entire 3 billion base pair long genome is new; you share everything with your ancestors. Each one of those base pairs is original, but it in a sequence it codes for a new amino acid, which go into another sequence to make a new protein.
You can look at it mathematically as well. 70! is about 10^100, far greater than the number of particles in the entire universe. That's just seventy items. There are 65 million published books on record.
That doesn't mean that things don't get boring when they're repeated. I wouldn't want to watch the same movie an excessive number of times or talk to the same people after I've learned everything possible from and about them. It's good that those are hard to accomplish.
Also, living on the sun (plasma not gas) has been done. Try the inside of a black hole; the title can be The Spaghetti Chronicles.
Argh, posted before I was finished.
We All Have Secrets' images should be changed so that they aren't boring/poorly done. There's an apostrophe deletion on image 2 and image 3 should be "whoops. there goes the neighborhood" on a picture of a mushroom cloud instead of "whoops. there goes my heart" on a picture of a spinning chair thing.
Aaron, the person making the images is not the same person who makes the secrets.
The image person could at least clean them up or select less-boring ones.
I wish I could edit my posts so I didn't need to make ten thousand.
The images are badly designed, anyway. Take these for example:
http://7.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kvp0tvwKic1qae83zo1_400.jpg
Some words aren't as easy to see as the others. This could've easily been fixed by moving it over a little bit.
The different-colored text behind some things needs an alpha channel so it's easier to read.
The pictures themselves are well-edited for the most part; it's the addition of the "secret" that makes it a failure. I like this one's picture.
I had one of my secrets made into a video. Well, the website did it, I never asked.
And Aaron sounds like Aaron here.
And I love your original writing. At least this entry.
why stop at an original concept? why use a language that is also spoken by millions of people around the world?
hell, why stop there? instead of just making up words, you could defy the conventions of text and have letters going diagonally and across the top and the sides and through the margins and all kinds of crazy things
i'd read it
I believe you were refering to me, and I said the books you read are Young Adult, cliche love-story crap. Not unoriginal. This is based on the fact that nearly every book picked up on the YA shelves at our local library have some sort of love interest, some sort of lonely teenage or preteen girl, and some kind of awesome guy that eventually falls in love with the girl.
No need to reply to this with a list of books that do not have those elements, I am well aware that there are YA books that do not have romance involved in them.
But most of them do.
ANYWAYS. I said that mostly because I LOVE On The Road and I was offended and surprised that someone does not like it. But that's okay, I have given the book more than enough love.
It IS a kick-ass book though, whether you agree or not (:
Aaron: Yes, our genes are the same ones our ancestors had but none of them had the same combination, allowing for genetic variety.
Samantha, this post reminds me of that quote on Makena's facebook. I like the points you make, though-it's all true. I guess the important thing is learning to live with the lack of originality in the world and recognizing it as well. And you call me pessimistic.... :P
Andrea-They don't. There are good books that are YA, and frankly, I'm not that into romance novels. Are you really offended that I don't have the exact same taste in books that you do? I'm not saying that I dislike the book for no particular reason, I disliked the book because I found it very hard to follow and first person narration can be kind of irritating. I've written first person stuff that can get kind of rambly and really irritating.
Emaline-You're right...as long as your ancestors aren't CLONES. Were you talking about "Based on various studies of men: 22% cheat, 54% married, 5% in an unmarried relationship, 21% gay. So 100% men are at least 1 of these. ;)"? Because I'm a little cynical? I don't think there's anything to learn to deal with in terms of lack of origionality. I mean, I didnt' have a lot riding on being origional or anything. I don't think I'm quite as pessimistic as you ;)
Andrea: Speaking of romances, NEVER read CLOSE ENCOUNTERS by Katherine Allred. It's awful.
Emaline: That's what I said.
No-the quote goes like this: "Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known." -Chuck Palahniuk
YES! I um, love that quote. We're a combination of the people we want to be and the people others want us to be. That is how we surprise each other, I think.
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