No Such Thing as an Original Idea

The Six Neighborhoods of Tropes *

Science Fiction is a genre that puts a premium the Original Idea, but I think its worth clarifying what exactly that is, especially for writers.

Often, after I get a kernel of an idea, I go over to TV Tropes to see how it's been handled in other places. If you don't know, TV Tropes is a massive wiki that catalogs storytelling conventions and devices across all sorts of creative and popular media. But be careful! It's dangerous territory. Every article links to several others, creating a maze more labyrinthine than anything Daedalus could have imagined. Seriously, that picture on the top is a map of TV Tropes links. According to Uther Dean,
TV Tropes will Ruin Your Life. So, consider yourself warned.

I don't shy away from this kind of thematic research, because, as Solomon said:  

That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 NKJV

And I find this comforting.

When I'm working up a new idea I find it useful to see the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of approaches to an idea (trope) that I'm working with. I'm not there to steal, though there is nothing wrong with stealing if you do it right. Austin Kleon has written a whole book about how to Steal Like an Artist.

by Austin Kleon

And filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch explains it much better than I can:

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”"

No matter what you're creating, it's not about coming up with an Original Idea, because it's not really about the idea at all. It's about the idea + you.

Take any old idea that's been expressed a million times over and dig deep inside yourself, find and reveal your own personal, human experience of it, and people will call it "original."

Jean-Luc Godard

* In the information is beautiful, but the subject tangential to this post category: check out this multi-part study about the nature of information on the Internet, using TV Tropes as its model. Here's the opening quote:

"HP Lovecraft popularized a certain type of malevolent force, something so massive and powerful and unconcerned and out-of-scale with humanity that we could not even understand the whole of it.  Instead, his characters would–before inevitably going mad–only experience a small portion of these beings, typically some kind of horrid extrusion into our reality.  There is much that these Eldritch Abominations have in common with the kind of massively peer-produced content that floats like icebergs in the Internet."  

Structure & Freedom

Network Structure
Bonsai Tree Table by Anke Weiss from Dezeen

I'm still working on my process, partly because I am currently stuck on a story. I have this idea. Actually it's a constellation of ideas along with an odd little collection of evocative images, characters, and places that make up a mood or feeling that I think this story could capture. This is generally what my unstructured ideas look like. I've been trying everything to discover the underlining structure (i.e. through line, sequence of events, plot) that will articulate this nebulous idea to the point where I can sensibly write it as a story.

So, the past couple weeks I've been just working toward some kind of outline. I have never had any luck writing by the seat of my pants. I blame my own empathy. I am very driven in my real life to avoid conflict, so when I just write into the blue everyone in my stories comes to sensible compromises or finds a way to walk away from the dragons they should be facing down. But making an outline is tricky. Outlines can strangle or obliterate a nascent unstructured idea before it's even had a chance to be born. I think it might be better so say I'm trying to "find" an outline rather than "make" one.

For me, the outline is important because structure is intrinsic to the world and our experience of it. Here's a quote from the guy that grew/built the table pictured above:

This work is the result of a research project about scale. The “network” structure can be found in every scale: by looking in as far as possible (cells, molecules, etc.), or by looking on the natural human scale (veins, lungs, trees, riverbeds, maps etc.), or by looking as far out as possible (solar system, galaxies). Even representations of the virtual world (the internet) resemble this structure.

Like this table that was once a living tree, my outlines need to grow and change, to be mutable, even while I'm drafting. The outline helps me solidify a collection of thoughts and emotions just enough so that I can capture some essence of the thing that will become the beating heart at the center of the story.