being unoriginal
I read a lot (if you haven't figured that out yet) so here goes with another post about what I'm reading and why it made me think.
This time I have been reading along the theme of gifted children. The other day I happened to find the book Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras, which is a 1953 science fiction novel about genius children, who got their high IQs from being born to parents exposed to radiation from a nuclear power plant accident.
(Incidentally, I'm pretty sure both Stan Lee and Orson Scott Card have read this book, as there are many parallels between X-Men and Ender's Game, respectively. Funny how that works. It's akin to the situation of Howard Hanson, influencing many composers yet he isn't well-remembered himself.)
One of the ideas brought up in the book was the idea of originality, and how it does not really exist. In terms of literary works (as the book brought it up), this means that for any story you can find a similar one--think of breaking it down into component themes or whatever they're called, like man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. magic, and so forth. Every story has already been told, or at least the basic idea of it has been. It is rather depressing, on the whole, to think that no idea I can come up with will be entirely original.
The book I picked up after Children of the Atom, a nonfiction study of gifted children by Ellen Winner (imaginatively titled, you guessed it, Gifted Children), rammed the point home in a rather more personal way. Pardon the immodesty, but I am fairly gifted in some areas. Going by the book's categories, those would be verbal and artistic (although not to the extent of the case studies she uses, by any means). I know plenty of people who fit the descriptions of the verbally gifted, fewer so of the artistically gifted, but there is one thing I did when I was younger that I have never known anyone else to do. And yet, there is a paragraph in the book that describes something I thought was rather unique about me:
"Particularly in middle childhood and adolescence, artistically gifted children create imaginary settings and fantasy characters in their drawings, and their drawings depict episodes in the lives of these invented characters. ...some gifted children were more interested in inventing imaginary worlds in their drawings than in experimenting with form and design." (I feel like I should cite it properly, so... Winner, 84. And, go.)
It's kind of unnerving to find out there are at least enough other people doing the same thing to have it noted in a book--I don't really know why it surprises me, but it does. I used to spend hours drawing people and thinking up their world. I have several notebooks from childhood full of these pictures, as well as notes about culture and people and the storyline. I still do this quite often--draw something and then make up a story about it, or draw it out to make the idea coalesce in my head. Granted, I suppose if I'd thought about it for a while I would have realized probably other people would do that, but I didn't.
Going back to originality, I feel that's another blow to the idea. Even when you think you are doing something no one else has done, you probably aren't. So this begs the question, why bother doing anything, if it's not really going to be original? Children of the Atom answered its own question: originality is really found in the form, rather than the idea. It's how you choose to put it together that matters. They were speaking more of poetic narrative and grammatical structure, I think, but if the issue had gone deeper I believe that it would have come to this point: no one ever experiences anything quite the same way. So while we might do the same things, while someone might participate in exactly the same activity and do it the exact same way, their impressions of the moment in time will never be the same.
Telling stories, then, is like a giant global game of Telephone--it gets changed from person to person, and you don't know what is going to happen throughout. Maybe life is like that too. If you've read to the end of The Amber Spyglass, we get to the harpies and have to tell the story of our lives; well, maybe someone could have lived and done exactly the same things as another person, but the story he or she tells won't be exactly the same. There is no such thing, really, as originality, but uniqueness--uniqueness might exist after all.
And that is, actually, a comforting thought.
This time I have been reading along the theme of gifted children. The other day I happened to find the book Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras, which is a 1953 science fiction novel about genius children, who got their high IQs from being born to parents exposed to radiation from a nuclear power plant accident.
(Incidentally, I'm pretty sure both Stan Lee and Orson Scott Card have read this book, as there are many parallels between X-Men and Ender's Game, respectively. Funny how that works. It's akin to the situation of Howard Hanson, influencing many composers yet he isn't well-remembered himself.)
One of the ideas brought up in the book was the idea of originality, and how it does not really exist. In terms of literary works (as the book brought it up), this means that for any story you can find a similar one--think of breaking it down into component themes or whatever they're called, like man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. magic, and so forth. Every story has already been told, or at least the basic idea of it has been. It is rather depressing, on the whole, to think that no idea I can come up with will be entirely original.
The book I picked up after Children of the Atom, a nonfiction study of gifted children by Ellen Winner (imaginatively titled, you guessed it, Gifted Children), rammed the point home in a rather more personal way. Pardon the immodesty, but I am fairly gifted in some areas. Going by the book's categories, those would be verbal and artistic (although not to the extent of the case studies she uses, by any means). I know plenty of people who fit the descriptions of the verbally gifted, fewer so of the artistically gifted, but there is one thing I did when I was younger that I have never known anyone else to do. And yet, there is a paragraph in the book that describes something I thought was rather unique about me:
"Particularly in middle childhood and adolescence, artistically gifted children create imaginary settings and fantasy characters in their drawings, and their drawings depict episodes in the lives of these invented characters. ...some gifted children were more interested in inventing imaginary worlds in their drawings than in experimenting with form and design." (I feel like I should cite it properly, so... Winner, 84. And, go.)
It's kind of unnerving to find out there are at least enough other people doing the same thing to have it noted in a book--I don't really know why it surprises me, but it does. I used to spend hours drawing people and thinking up their world. I have several notebooks from childhood full of these pictures, as well as notes about culture and people and the storyline. I still do this quite often--draw something and then make up a story about it, or draw it out to make the idea coalesce in my head. Granted, I suppose if I'd thought about it for a while I would have realized probably other people would do that, but I didn't.
Going back to originality, I feel that's another blow to the idea. Even when you think you are doing something no one else has done, you probably aren't. So this begs the question, why bother doing anything, if it's not really going to be original? Children of the Atom answered its own question: originality is really found in the form, rather than the idea. It's how you choose to put it together that matters. They were speaking more of poetic narrative and grammatical structure, I think, but if the issue had gone deeper I believe that it would have come to this point: no one ever experiences anything quite the same way. So while we might do the same things, while someone might participate in exactly the same activity and do it the exact same way, their impressions of the moment in time will never be the same.
Telling stories, then, is like a giant global game of Telephone--it gets changed from person to person, and you don't know what is going to happen throughout. Maybe life is like that too. If you've read to the end of The Amber Spyglass, we get to the harpies and have to tell the story of our lives; well, maybe someone could have lived and done exactly the same things as another person, but the story he or she tells won't be exactly the same. There is no such thing, really, as originality, but uniqueness--uniqueness might exist after all.
And that is, actually, a comforting thought.