a delayed tale of horror

There is a certain type of person who lacks vision.

They believe what they are told, provided the information comes from a “good source” (someone who looks and sounds like them).

They do what they are told, provided the commands come from an “authority figure” (again, someone who doesn’t challenge their assumptions of what authority looks like).

They find their boxes quickly in life and they stay firmly within the walls of those boxes because the inside is so comfortable and the outside is so very, very scary. Sometimes, the inside of the box is uncomfortable, too, but that’s life and surely outside the box is worse.

We are all, to some extent, this kind of person.

But let’s try a little exercise:

Let’s imagine a fictional country that prides itself on being very box-like. In this country, there is a rigid social order: one race holds itself to be superior, one sex holds itself to be superior, one religion that holds itself to be superior, etc. No one new may enter unless they have an engraved invitation, which is usually reserved for people who look and sound like the ruling class or who at least have a lot of money. We’ll call this fictional country Boxistan (because I am very bad at coming up with names).

Let’s imagine that the fictional ruler of Boxistan, who represents a minority of the population, develops a fictional illness —say, Rectocranial Inversion Syndrome, which everyone knows to be fatal due to lack of oxygen. In Boxistan, only the best of the best get to go to college and, perhaps ultimately, win grants to conduct vital medical research. “Best of the best” for our purposes is defined as people who look like the ruling class or are nonthreatening and brilliant.

Now let’s imagine that the person who could have saved our fictional ruler is born poor elsewhere, in a country that struggles with poverty, war, famine —the usual suspects —and tries to seek refuge in Boxistan. Or perhaps our fictional scientist is born in Boxistan, to a family that isn’t quite right, in the sense that they are poor or of the “wrong” race, or perhaps our fictional scientist is of the “wrong” sexual orientation.

Our fictional ruler would asphyxiate and die.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that the answers to some of our problems might come from people who don’t look or sound like us or who come from unexpected places. It’s likely, in fact. If you consider that the population of Boxistan is over 300 million people, but the population of people in Boxistan who aren’t the “right” sort are over half of that number, and the population of the world is over 7 billion people, it is likely.

If I were that fictional ruler and really thought about those odds, I’d be terrified. He is slowly wasting away for no reason at all. It’s too bad he can’t get enough oxygen in there to think clearly and do the math.

no new tale to tell

We've all thought it, which just goes to show maybe there are no more truly novel things to say.

Maybe it's all been said?

If you are a writer, this is one very loud mouth on the multi-headed hydra that is Imposter Syndrome: the head of I Don't Have Any Original Ideas.

What is the point of writing if it's all been said? Why clutter up the landscape with redundancy? Isn't that what we do with editing? Whittle away the excess?

What if there is no point to what I am writing because someone else said it better and earlier?

I was thinking about this this evening and would like to offer an alternative take.

Perhaps what we think of as redundant is actually the result of the commonalities in the human experience. The great themes of literature are very large. They are experiences we all have. Aspects of our human experience are common to us all. That is what we respond to in a really well-written combination of words. 

How many stories can there be about betrayal or love? How many poems can there be about nature or grief? The answer is not a finite number. We do not stop telling the stories or composing the poems because the themes have already been covered. There is enough room to express betrayal and love, nature and grief in unique ways each and every time. There are the overlays of personality, time, culture, gender, writing style, genre, language, level of formality, geography, ...there are literally millions of ways to reinterpret themes. By virtue of the fact that we are all individuals, then odds are there is originality in what we have to say. 

I'm not talking about remakes, although some of those can even turn out well, given enough time or distance between the original and the reimagined version. I'm also not saying plagiarism is a good idea --don't do that. What I mean is that you should write what you are drawn to write. Do not worry about originality.

With this blog post, I have not cut off the hydra's I Don't Have Any Original Ideas head. I've read the original of that story and know it turns out to be problematic. In my version, the creature's jaw gets wired shut --or there's always duct tape. Back in the days of the Ancient Greeks, they didn't have duct tape. Now, we do. It's not an original story, but it is new.

Happy writing.