Originality and the Zeitgeist

[sartorias]

I went to pinch hit as a sub today (hey, I desperately need that fifty smackeroos) and came home to zip through the bazillion posts gathered while I was gone. Stumbled to a halt when I came across this post by Charles Butler as the latest in the blog of a group of writers for kids, "An Awfully Big Blog Adventure."

Comments

[a_d_medievalist]

hmph -- if you and Charles Butler don't watch out, Terry Brooks will start claiming it was all ideons!

[asakiyume]

Blogger didn't like me today and wouldn't let me publish my comment for that blog, but what I wanted to say was that it's also interesting to read different takes on the same ideon inspired theme. No authors write the same idea the same way.

I've felt that about pop songs sometimes. At one point there were three hit songs in the charts that mentioned superman; another time there were three or more songs that played on the idea of breathing... weird, but the songs were all very different.

And as for originality, I remember talking with a coworker at a sh--t job about being crushed, in school, by the burden of having to be original. Something different. Something "way out there" But if you bring a live bird to school and stand on the top of your desk and sing your report, instead of having it on paper etc. etc., well, then you're just a trouble maker or an attention seeker. So original... but comprehensible-to-the-teacher-level-original (so not super original, actually). Bleaah.....

[sartorias]

Yeah...I get thrown out of blogger and blogspot more often than I can connect.

Yes...originality sometimes just plain doesn't make sense. "Oh, how . . . original!" used to translate out in so many contexts as, "Wow, what an incredibly bad idea!"

[burger_eater]

I don't think it's possible to be truly original, but I do think it's possible to do things that are outside What Everyone Else Is Doing At The Moment that, while not exactly new, is so well done that it feels fresh and bracing.

[sartorias]

I do think one definition of genius is the ability to find that balance point.

[pjthompson]

But names and tropes showing up in stories by authors who had no contact? What's all that about? What triggered the similarities off in those authors?

Ideons are as good an explanation as any, I think. Something triggers the zeitgeist and blammo!

[sartorias]

Yep, I think so too....but why the ideons? How do they float about the creative space?

[pjthompson]

Well, there's a whole mystical line of thinking on that, but on a practical level I think that a germ of an idea can appear in a entertainment, news story, et al., and get circulated around the globe. That releases something into the collective unconscious, I think. But it's difficult to say what brings on the startling echo of similarities, like two characters both named Watt. (The name thing happened to me once. Very startling to see it Out There when one is working on a story

[sartorias]

My feelings on this are very much like yours.

[mallory_blog]

Sliding slightly sideways here - in order to examine what is informing my writing I took a children's lit class this semester to see what it is that I read back in the day - in particular I was looking at old stuff because I'm old. It was shocking for me. Reading as a child was more like injesting a book whole I tried to read the library out of books (and did so with a library branch) - a majority of the works in that library system were white-centric and male-centric and lets be fair here - they were often trope. I gobbled them

[sartorias]

It's interesting to me to track reactions to books I considered innovative for whatever reason, that stand still as the cultural tide moves past.

There was a very enlightening discussion somewhere here a year or two back about Anne McAffrey's first Dragon book, what was it, Dragonrider? So many of the titles are similar. Anyway, when it first came out, it seems refreshing and innovative--Lessa got to be head of something, she stood up to the men, she wasn't slapped down for desire, etc. She went from a domestic drudge to freedom!

Segue up thirty years later, and young women are complaining about how she's emotionally retarded and annoyingly d domesticated, while the men get all the fun...what's more, she's raped, and likes it.

[gauroth]

I read that book when it first came out and was bowled over because, as you say, Lessa went from being the lowest of the low to being an important person. At the time, this was both radical and empowering and a little shocking - girls weren't meant to be like that! They certainly weren't like that in my beloved Tolkien

[sartorias]

Yep! Definitely.