Originality is overrated

We're all standing on the shoulders of others

Whoa. I can already see people's hackles rising, even more than they did when I talked about using AI voices to create rough cuts of audio drama. But bear with me.

Let's start by jumping sideways into the world of film. West Side Story, The Magnificent Seven, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, Clueless, Throne of Blood… What do they all have in common? They’re all reworkings of other stories. (Romeo and Juliet, Seven Samurai, the Odyssey, Emma, and Macbeth.)¹

Throne of Blood: Kurosawa does Macbeth. My favorite version of this story.

Since the very beginning of the film industry, only about 25% of films have been based on original IP. Most early films were based on plays or books, and by 1910, they were already remaking movies and making sequels.² The proportion of original film scripts has remained roughly constant for 100 years: the only real difference is that these days they also remake stories that originated in comics or on TV, rather than on a stage. And the higher the budget, the more likely it is that it’s an adaptation. Original scripts tend to be the province of indie filmmakers and low-budget studios.

Or what about music? Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, classics like Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower or Whitney’s I Will Always Love You, or the complete works of Post-Modern Jukebox... Very often, the covers are better known than the originals, and many people don't even realize that their favorite song was a cover. In My Time of Dying, for example, was originally written in 1928 by Blind Willie Johnson, almost half a century before Led Zeppelin made it famous on their 1973 album, Physical Graffiti.

Or art. What about Picasso's take on Las Meninas by Velazquez? Lichtenstein and the entire Pop Art movement were all about reworking things like comic images. Classical painters reworked the same ideas from religion and mythology again and again.

Las Meninas, by Velazquez and Picasso

In other words, none of these were original ideas. They were original takes on an existing idea.

So why do we think differently about books?

Great books don't have to be original. There's nothing wrong with retelling a well-known story. Perhaps you're just making it accessible to a modern leadership by updating the language or slightly changing the context. Perhaps you're offering a fresh new perspective on something already familiar. Perhaps you're changing it so completely that it's barely recognizable anymore.

Some of our most beloved books are retellings of folk tales and mythology, such as The Sword in the Stone, The Mists of Avalon, and countless other Arthurian novels. More recently, you have books like Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles, or Salman Rushdie's take on 1001 Nights, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. And let’s not forget my new favorite, Crichton’s Beowulf, aka Eaters of the Dead. And heck, even Tolkien cut his teeth as an undergrad in 1914-15 by retelling Finnish myths.

Then you've got fictionalized biographies. You’re not coming up with an original story or original characters - at least, not completely. The facts aren't original. History is still history. The interest for the reader is in how you tell it. I, Claudius, The Other Boleyn Girl, and The White Queen all spring to mind, plus there are thousands of lesser-known novels covering the lives of everyone from the Widow Cliquot to Hürrem Sultan or Aaron Burr.

And then we come to my favorite, the mashup. Take a well-known story or genre, and transplant it into a different setting. How many golden age SF novels are simply westerns, war stories, colonial adventures, whodunits, or romances set in space? Take the Sherlock Holmes formula, drop it into a different place and time, and you've got Cadfael and countless other historical detectives. Take Malory Towers or some other classic British school story, add wizards, and you've got Harry Potter. Add dragons to the Wars of the Roses and you get A Song Of Ice And Fire. Dan Dare was just Biggles with spaceships. (Okay, that’s a comic, but that’s not important right now.) The Stainless Steel Rat was a 1960s heist movie in space.

I always liked the comic book adaptation that ran in 2000AD. James Coburn would have been great as Slippery Jim diGriz.

We like these stories because they're made up of familiar elements but they're put together in a new, fresh, and exciting way. In other words, we like them because they're not completely original.

And sometimes we retell stories simply because we can do them better. The early examples of any genre are often mediocre. We haven't yet established the tropes. We haven't quite worked out what it is that our readers really want. Those pioneering authors are often original, but they're not always very good. Later authors see the potential in them and build on those original ideas. They retell the same stories over and over again, adding something new each time. It’s true for every genre: detective stories, techno-thrillers, or spy stories, and so on. Nobody would argue that Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands from 1903 is anywhere close to the level of Le Carré or Deighton at their peak. Sherlock Holmes is far superior to Charles Auguste Dupin, and in turn, Doyle seems very staid and contrived compared to many modern writers.

Admittedly, a lot of these retold me-too stories are shit. But then, according to Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is shit. Little by little, the whole genre gets better. A lot of 1930s SF, for example, is complete drivel. They tried a lot of different things, and a lot of it - arguably, most of it - didn't work. If you try reading some of those old magazines, you’ll rapidly realize how many of the stories are bland, derivative, badly written and practically unreadable. But that was what led to the so-called Golden Age: without a decade of God-awful pulp novels and short stories, we wouldn't have had greats like Clarke and Asimov, and then in turn, their successors such as Greg Bear, Frank Herbert, Neal Stephenson, and many many more.

And in closing, let's just remember that if your aim is to get published and make money, publishers are far more likely to pick books that are similar to things that have already enjoyed proven success. They don't want completely original ideas, and neither do the majority of readers. Publishers have a market, and they want to give that market what they already know they want.

I'm not saying you should be unoriginal. If that's all we want from literature, ChatGPT will probably be able to deliver that by the truckload very soon and we should all quit writing now.

But on the other hand, originality shouldn't be the only yardstick by which you measure yourself, at least not in terms of plot, setting and character. Of course, you should have original elements to your work, but you don’t need to think in terms of “Am I doing something that’s never been done before?” It’s perfectly okay to think of it in terms of “What am I bringing to this story? How is the way that I am telling this story going to make people want to read it? Am I doing this in a way that’s never been done before?” That’s more than sufficient.

1. And of course, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth weren't original Shakespeare stories either. Very few of Shakespeare’s stories were original.

2. That’s not to say they’re either good or successful. Let's not mention Gus Van Sant's Psycho or the recent Crow remake. But they get funded and they provide jobs for people, because someone believed they were worth making.