Originality is dead.

A few of my more recent lectures have made it very clear that no idea is new or original. This has lead me to want to throw myself from a very tall building, seeing as, you know, none of the work I have ever slaved over is original anyway so who cares. Originality is dead and I would argue that technology killed it.

Every idea I have ever pitched has at some point met with this response 'Ah that's kind of like this book/film/article where...' Every idea we come up with is like something else. This is because our lives are solely intertextual. We cannot help but see similarities between works of fiction, in tweets or status updates. Why is this? How have we become an intertextual society?

Technology is the answer that I would give. We can share work at the click of a button, we can link articles, surf world news, read newspapers from other countries and time periods. We can watch shows we have missed, shows from years ago, films, all online. We have surrounded ourselves with material and it all interweaves with and comments on everything else. Any person who is sitting at home on their computer, sitting on the bus on their phone, sitting in class on their tablet, can be a critic, an artist, a social presence and an amateur blogger. We can be and see so many different things at once, we can interact with them. No wonder we have brought that notion into our films and literature. 

Contemporary writing, films and articles are filled with references to other writing, films and articles. Sometimes this is deliberate, other times it is subconscious. We are constantly becoming involved in several things at once online, it is not possible for us to keep this out of our creative work. Right this minute, as I am typing, I may be reminding you of someone else, or something else. I may sound like an article you read the other day, I may use the same phrases as a character you were just thinking about. We contrast and compare naturally, it is only human to do so. Originality is dead, then, and perhaps humans killed it. It would not be the first time we had throttled a state of being out of existence.

So what hope do our creative minds have? Little, I am afraid. Creative people will never be able to escape the scrutiny of human nature. We are attuned to references, we like to criticise. We like to look at a great piece of work and shoot it down because it has been done or seen before. It gives us pleasure to think that one great artist or another is actually not so great because someone before had worked in the same way. I find that the one criticism I cannot bare is 'it has been done.' We have been brought up in a society that lauds originality and criticises repetition. 

But, that does not mean that we should just give up. I am still writing, I am still writing. I am still writing. I am learning and reading and finding different ways in which to express myself. Good writers, I think, are aware that intertextuality is unavoidable. Great writers use this knowledge, and create work that cannot be criticised for being unoriginal because that was how it was supposed to be. This does not mean that great pieces of art are complete regurgitations. This means that great pieces of art are taking those regurgitations and twisting them into new forms. I have not yet found the right way of doing this, I do not hold the secret to great writing. But, I am willing to try and find it.