Just how much originality is there, anyway?
The simple fact of the matter is . . . not much. It’s really hard to set out to create something and not step somewhere that someone else has already been before, no matter what you’re trying to create. Music builds and improves on the sounds of music past, borrowing and changing and remixing what has been done before. Artists begin honing their skills through imitation, whether it’s imitation of the world around them or of another artist’s work. Writers, well, writers may just write the same story another storyteller has told somewhere before.
Even Shakespeare was a plagiarist. The success of the artist or writer comes not from being completely original, but from doing what has been done in a new and more interesting way. Putting a new spin on something, taking something that was old and dreary and giving it new life.
The trick, when trying to come up with an idea for a story (or picture, or song) is not to completely avoid all of your possible influences but to take from them as if you’re borrowing a cup of sugar, with love and respect, and to give back. There are tons of common stories that have been done again, and again, and again, each time with differing levels of success. (girl meets guy; cop chases killer; knight sets off on a sacred quest; etc) You shouldn’t get discouraged just because your story might have been told in some form before. The trick is to take that same-old story and make it your own. Put your stamp on it, make it live and breathe as only you can do it.
It’s natural to borrow from the styles and techniques of the creators that you most admire, but in the end the story is your baby, no matter how many people have held it and fostered it before, and it’s your responsibility to nurture it to adulthood. Do it well, and you’ve got something that people will proclaim “original”, even if at its most basic level it really isn’t.
This is why Stephen King can get away with writing the same story repeatedly (Male writer in New England finds himself in strange situation and must act the hero to get out of it) to such success, why J. K. Rowling could write a story about a boy in a magic school (which had been done many times before) and become the richest woman in England, and why Shakespeare could take common stories being told and performed in Tudor England and turn them into literary masterpieces.
They didn’t do anything totally original. They stood on the backs of what had come before and they reached higher, and did what they were doing better than their predecessors, but original, they were not.
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The problem is, in our modern-day litigation-happy world, you can only ‘copy’ so much before the original work’s publisher slaps you with a intellectual property lawsuit. =\
Yeah, Rowling’s had her own issues with that. I’m not advocating direct plagiarism, though, by a long shot…just saying that it’s hard to come up with an idea that hasn’t been done somewhere, at some point, by somebody, and that’s alright, as long as you take that old idea and spin it in your own unique way.