Lillie Lainoff
By Lillie Lainoff
One day during my sophomore year at Washington, DC’s Woodrow Wilson High School, my English teacher informed our class that there were only six, maybe seven, original plots in all of literature and film. Not even William Shakespeare’s plays have original story lines, she said. As a lover of all things Shakespeare, I was shocked.
“And, I hate to break it to you,” she added, “but ‘Avatar’ is just ‘Pocahontas’ with blue people in space.”
These works were all wonderful pieces of art, creative and well-developed, she told us, but they were not original.
It wasn’t until my freshman year in college, while trying to find a unique topic for a research paper, that I really thought about what originality means. I spent so much time trying to pick an original topic for that paper that I had barely any time to write it.
The quest for originality can become obsessive. Works that are deemed unoriginal — as in, anything that bears too much resemblance to something else — come in for criticism. For example, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the most prestigious US competition for teens, judges students’ submissions on “originality, technical skill and the emergence of a personal voice or vision.” The range and quality of work they receive each year is extraordinary. But would one teenager’s meticulously painted self-portrait be any less beautiful if it had been inspired by the work of Frida Kahlo?
I suspect that most of our good, great and even monumental ideas are not original. Odds are, one of the other 7 billion people in the world has had the same idea for that start-up or phone app you’re about to develop, that movie script or essay you’re about to write. Every idea, including the ones I’m expressing here, can be written thousands of ways. Some of them will be creative, others daring. But they will probably not be original. As Mark Twain once wrote in a letter to Helen Keller, “All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”
According to the Web video series “Everything Is a Remix,” of the 10 highest-grossing films each year from 2001 to 2011, 74 were sequels, remakes, or adaptations of comic books, novels and other sources. These include best-picture Oscar winners (“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”), films based on theme-park rides (“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”) and fairy tales (“Tangled”). Is it right to hold this against them? No.
If we criticise the perceived lack of originality, we must do the same to almost every piece of writing published in the past few centuries.
I’m not suggesting that we stop trying to be original. There are new, unprecedented concepts out there; they just happen to be scarce. So better to strive for quality.
If in that process you stumble upon something truly original, wonderful. But the next time you are starting a business, painting a portrait or writing an essay, focus less on coming up with an original idea and more on making it the best product you can.
Even though the plot of “The Lion King” may be a dead ringer for “Hamlet,” you can’t deny the magic of watching Rafiki lift baby Simba into the air or stop yourself from singing along with the characters. WP-BLOOMBERG
By Lillie Lainoff
One day during my sophomore year at Washington, DC’s Woodrow Wilson High School, my English teacher informed our class that there were only six, maybe seven, original plots in all of literature and film. Not even William Shakespeare’s plays have original story lines, she said. As a lover of all things Shakespeare, I was shocked.
“And, I hate to break it to you,” she added, “but ‘Avatar’ is just ‘Pocahontas’ with blue people in space.”
These works were all wonderful pieces of art, creative and well-developed, she told us, but they were not original.
It wasn’t until my freshman year in college, while trying to find a unique topic for a research paper, that I really thought about what originality means. I spent so much time trying to pick an original topic for that paper that I had barely any time to write it.
The quest for originality can become obsessive. Works that are deemed unoriginal — as in, anything that bears too much resemblance to something else — come in for criticism. For example, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the most prestigious US competition for teens, judges students’ submissions on “originality, technical skill and the emergence of a personal voice or vision.” The range and quality of work they receive each year is extraordinary. But would one teenager’s meticulously painted self-portrait be any less beautiful if it had been inspired by the work of Frida Kahlo?
I suspect that most of our good, great and even monumental ideas are not original. Odds are, one of the other 7 billion people in the world has had the same idea for that start-up or phone app you’re about to develop, that movie script or essay you’re about to write. Every idea, including the ones I’m expressing here, can be written thousands of ways. Some of them will be creative, others daring. But they will probably not be original. As Mark Twain once wrote in a letter to Helen Keller, “All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”
According to the Web video series “Everything Is a Remix,” of the 10 highest-grossing films each year from 2001 to 2011, 74 were sequels, remakes, or adaptations of comic books, novels and other sources. These include best-picture Oscar winners (“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”), films based on theme-park rides (“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”) and fairy tales (“Tangled”). Is it right to hold this against them? No.
If we criticise the perceived lack of originality, we must do the same to almost every piece of writing published in the past few centuries.
I’m not suggesting that we stop trying to be original. There are new, unprecedented concepts out there; they just happen to be scarce. So better to strive for quality.
If in that process you stumble upon something truly original, wonderful. But the next time you are starting a business, painting a portrait or writing an essay, focus less on coming up with an original idea and more on making it the best product you can.
Even though the plot of “The Lion King” may be a dead ringer for “Hamlet,” you can’t deny the magic of watching Rafiki lift baby Simba into the air or stop yourself from singing along with the characters. WP-BLOOMBERG
