Writing is Writing it Over Again

Every writer—if you’ve written long enough—knows this moment: the moment where you’re watching a movie, or perhaps just reading a book, and there it is. Your story. Your idea. Your character. Your dialogue. Not that it’s been stolen from you, but you both lucked on the same source of inspiration; they just beat you to it.

For me, it was a situation—a humorous moment that two characters found themselves in, which led to very awkward dialogue that made the situation even funnier. And I had imagined it all. Some contextual details aside, it was more or less the same scene, with quite similar dialogue, though with a slightly different conclusion. My story—almost my words. And now I couldn’t use them. Or I could, but it would forever be in the shadow of the previous work, which would lead to a profoundly guilty conscience. 

Even if I did pass it off as my own, the internet is keen to point out unoriginal premises, such as when a recent (and very clever) episode of The Orville borrowed an idea from the show Black Mirror. Comment after comment accused the show of plagiarism, of being derivative, of how much better the “original” was...though, sadly, that idea was not coined by the writers of Black Mirror, and must have been used in countless science fiction stories over the years (for those interested, check out The Orville, Season 1, Episode 7, “Majority Rule”).  Indeed, with the encyclopedic knowledge of the average fan, as well as the endless database that is the internet, why would anyone want to risk writing a story that might be—that will be—that already is a copy of a copy of a copy?

But is it a copy if you’ve never seen the original? Certainly it’s not plagiarism, but if you luck on a story that borrows ideas and twists from another show, or a story now out of print for 60 years, should you hastily withdraw from the scene with a desperate mea culpa? If so, then where would the apologies end? The simple truth is that every story is an act of unconscious plagiarism, borrowing the essence of a thousand stories that preceded it. Characters are traded like faded playing cards used year after year in a kindergarten classroom. And plots—well, they’re like faces, which repeat in an endless loop,

making a hundred year-old photograph or a five hundred year-old painting look like your best friend’s mother.

Let’s face it, the very act of writing is derivative, since self-expression goes back to the very idea of history itself. We tell stories to be remembered, and to remember ourselves. In general, we all want to remember the same things: acts of love and heroism, moments of greed and sacrifice, and the five or six dick jokes that never get old (even Shakespeare enjoyed them). With so many books telling so many stories, most of them more or less the same, is there really any reason to keep going? In the past, when books vanished through war or were devoured by time, it made more sense: books had to be replaced, stories needed to be retold, particularly when so much literature only existed in the mind’s and voices of nomadic storytellers.

In the 21st century, however, nothing gets lost: a hundred years of books are jockeying for space in used bookstores, while a hundred million more are waiting to be downloaded, with new ones published by the second (or milisecond). It is the nature of literature to help us remember, but how many reminders do we truly need? Aren’t a hundred thousand—even a million—books sufficient to jar our memory of the basics: that we’re human, we’re flawed, we’re capable of the greatest evils and the greatest triumphs, and we love a good dick and fart joke?

The same question has been asked throughout history; no doubt the Sumerians (who invented pretty much everything known to man) asked themselves, “haven’t all the songs been sung? What more could any human say about his or her adventures?” After all, Gilgamesh not only fought all the monsters on earth but also stormed the Underworld to rescue his best friend from the jaws of death. What more could you conjure up for a sequel? So if we drained the well a good five or six thousand years ago, shouldn’t we throw in the towel? It’s not like we’ll ever be at a loss for good books, and there’s more authors than we could ever discover or five or six lifetimes devoted solely, and slavishly, to reading.

The answer is a surprisingly simple one: storytelling is an art. And all art is a language, something that must grow and develop through speech and intercourse with the world. If we stopped writing words themselves would grind to a halt. We would probably stop reading, too. Once books become museum pieces, something we once did when we had more to say, they will no longer seem relevant. The beauty of art is that it’s a living conversation: we all add to it, even by reading and discussing it with others (particularly those of us in college, since college is an embodiment—even a metaphor—of the process of art).

The struggle of art is to find new ways to keep it relevant and meaningful to a new generation. We do that, largely, by writing new books on old themes; old characters in new worlds; timeless love affairs with modern mores. The story remains the same, but the readers are ever-changing. Even to read a book changes what it was, since every new generation reads with fresh eyes and different voices in their heads. Writing a new book based on a timeless folktale makes us read the original anew. We see how the modern author interprets it, and writes it into existence by a careful act of addition and subtraction. This doesn’t negate the original or exalt the revision. They exist together, like father and son, mother and daughter, or better yet, siblings; they both share the same DNA, even if it speaks a different language.

In fact, one work can help us translate the other—and we can go in either direction. Too often, we’re taught to see works as existing in a vacuum, each one “original” or “derivative,” and the greatest works betray the greatest originality. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Both Shakespeare and Chaucer pilfered nearly all their plots, carefully cherry-picking through the annals of Greek and Italian literature for the ripest fruits. To be sure, they took these threadbare plots (some of them very homely) and built them into towers that could be seen for a thousand generations. Even Chaucer’s most original creation, The Wife of Bath, tells a story of King Arthur that was second-hand in the 14th century.

At its heart, writing is more a response than an act of creation, so the more you know the conversation, the easier it is to write. Shakespeare wanted to write poetry, to create dialogue, to make audiences laugh; why waste time concocting an original plot that might do none of these things, when he had Boccaccio or Ovid for inspiration? In this sense, we’re the luckiest generation of writers: for we have everything to draw from. Every writer who ever drew breath, every story, every poem, every play, every biography. All we have to do is find the best ones (and they’ve been carefully curated for us by generations of scholars and critics) and write a love letter in response.

The best works, after all, are affairs of the heart, written not to this or that person, but to the works we first fell in love with. Look at the recent Netflix smash, Stranger Things, which is almost scholarly in its homages to every great 80’s horror and science fiction film large and small. To me, nothing is more Shakespearean: give the audience what it wants, but remind us why we want it. Once you figure that out, the rest is just taking dictation. But be warned: taking something apart is much easier than putting it back together. We can easily see how a Shakespeare play is composed of iambic pentameter and a plot of mistaken identities; but trying to make it sing is alchemy of a higher order. Perhaps that’s the real reason we keep writing in defiance of time and an increasing volume of books: to convince us that it can actually be done, by mere mortals, writing against time and advancing senility.