Stolen Ideas About Originality
EPISODE 039: STOLEN IDEAS ABOUT ORIGINALITY
No one likes being called a copy-cat. Among the great pursuits of many everyday creative people is the desire for originality, to make things no one else has made. Is it possible? Is it desirable? And might we not be better served by spending our energies on becoming more distinct individuals and letting originality take care of itself? Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
It occurred to me as I was writing this episode, which is essentially about originality, that spending an hour, as I did, looking for quotes, from other people, about originality, was ironic at the highest level. Perhaps I should be doing an episode about Irony instead, because it can’t possibly be a good sign that my own thoughts about originality are little more than derivative. Or is it? I mean, T.S. Eliot said “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said “all my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients,” which is just Ralph’s tongue-in-cheek way of admitting his own thoughts had been pre-thunk by others many generations before. Pablo Picasso, who I seem to quote more and more often these days, said “good artists borrow, great artists steal” and as this quote is so close to the one from his contemporary, T.S.Eliot, there’s a good chance one of them stole the quote from the other, which is also either profoundly ironic or just proves the point. It’s probably both.
My searches on the theme of originality turned up hundreds of quotes each of them similar to the next but they all pushed to 1 of 2 extremes, the first being: you need to be original, it’s no good being someone else! The second pole was: everything is derivative, and great artists steal it all. So which is true? Like so much in life, I think the wisdom is found in both. It’s the tension between them where the freedom is. I think french filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s quote is the most clarifying: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”
What does it mean to be original? Is it possible? Is it desirable? And is it possible to escape the suspicion that everything we’re doing is just derivative? I’m David duChemin and this is episode 039 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Intro/music
I can remember as far back as my memories of the schoolyard will take me, being called–and calling others–a copy-cat. Piggy-backed on those memories are the emotions that came with those accusations. I still remember being called a copy-cat and the kind of defensiveness it raised in me. I can still feel it. I want to spin around in my chair even now and hurl back: I am not! You are! Not very original, I know. I don’t think there was much you could have called me that would get my hackles up faster. If you really wanted to push my buttons, there was no better way. There still isn’t. Recently I saw a video on YouTube in which a photographer suggested one of my images could well be a copy of his, and it took me a week before I didn’t want to rush to defend myself. It is not! In saying that I realize I STILL want to defend myself. I’m proud of that image, had never heard of this photographer nor seen the image he suggested might be copied, and to be suspected of what amounts to visual plagiarism still gives me the rage.
No one wants to be a copy-cat, or to be seen as one. Even 5-year olds understand that. Most of us put a piece of ourselves in the work we do and when it is suggested that work doesn’t reflect us, our vision, our choices, or skill, but in fact someone else, well no wonder we kind of lose our emotional footing for a moment. Or a week. If we are all the snowflakes our parents told us we are, individual and special, and unlike anyone else, and if our art, whatever that is, is meant to contain a piece of us, what does that mean for the work that is suddenly revealed NOT to be original? I think it means, or we take it to mean, that WE ourselves then are not as unique as we thought and that’s a tough existential pill to swallow.
I think it’s important to remember a few ideas that will help re-frame this or bring it back into perspective.
The first is that we’re all growing into individuality. Sure, we’re all born different and unique, but that difference between us is probably not as vast a chasm as we like to think. Your fingerprints and mine might be wildly different. But how much variations do we really expect to see if we pull a sample from everyone alive today? How wildly different do you think those prints will look? At best they’re variations on a theme. Same with snowflakes, sure in theory we get that they’re all different, but let’s be honest, a snowflake is still a snowflake.
But we are not snowflakes. Most snowflakes are on a path to becoming water again, especially these days. They begin unique, incredibly complex and slowly melt away from that complexity and individuality, and back to the simplicity of a drop of water. We, on the other hand, grow from simplicity into greater complexity. Or we can if we keep learning, keep becoming the people we are becoming. One day we too will dissolve back into the elements from which we came. But for now, we are becoming more and more our own distinct people, pulling from other influences and experiences, making choices and connections others might never have done, nor do again. Your job is not to be unique and maintain that uniqueness, nor to defend it. Your job is to become more and more unique.
That we are all growing into individuals of greater complexity is of great comfort to me. It means there’s possibility there, that the dye has not been cast. It’s like we’ve all been formed out of the same featureless lump of clay and our job is to become the unique one-of-a-kind people we’ve believed we are all along. And so when we look at what we make and we bemoan its own lack of uniqueness, doesn’t it help to be able to admit to ourselves that it’s on a continuum and it, our work, along with we ourselves, are becoming more unique? We don’t need to defend that uniqueness but work toward it. In the direction that only we can take it as we become more and more the people we have the potential of becoming.
If that is true, I think it couples nicely with another reality, and that is the unavoidable notion that we’re all working with the same raw materials. We live and work in a closed system. It’s like we’re all locked into the same studio together and nothing gets in or out. So when we worry that our work is derivative, we’re right. It is. Of course it is. Not one of us gets slipped some new thing with which to make whatever it is we create. In fact, it’s not only that we’re starting with the same materials as each other, but we’re using what got left over from previous generations, and recycling the best of it in new ways; all of those creators were trying to be original as well, to make their thing with their whole hearts and hoping desperately no one calls them a copy cat.
For what we make to be derivative means it derives or comes from something else. Well, at the risk of sounding like a 4 year old, duh! Of course it does. We’ve allowed the charge of derivation to become a slur, not an honest acknowledgement of the constraints we all work with, specifically the lack of truly new materials. That does not mean there is no innovation and it does not suggest we should all just give up the search for originality, but it does mean, I think, that there is a different way to look at originality, a way that brings us closer to freedom and authenticity and nudges us further from the neurotic need to confirm just how different our snowflake is, as though the whirls of your fingerprints alone truly stand out among the billions of others. How’s that for a mixed metaphor?
First of all, the moment we define “original" as being different from all others, we are comparing ourselves and the merits of who we are and what we create, with those others. You’re not saying my work is original because it’s mine, but because it’s not like what anyone else has done. Can you imagine making that the focus of your creative efforts? How exhausting would that be?
I don’t think I have to remind you of the toxicity of comparisons, never mind the absurdity of trying. Buuuut, I’m still going to. Is that truly what you want from your life and work? Merely not be to like the billions of others with whom we share this locked studio? Or the 108 billion Homo sapiens that have walked this planet so far? Not only does that sound like a truly Sisyphean task, but even if you could achieve it, there’s no guarantee your work would be a reflection of you. Different for the sake of being different, yes. Unique? Maybe. But original? No.
I might be splitting hairs here, but that’s as much a part of me as mixing my metaphors, so buckle up. To be original probably means several things. Language is organic and we can use the same word to mean different things. But here’s how I see it. To be original means a thing is true to its origins or reflects those origins. I don’t want my work to be unlike the work of others, specifically; I want it to be like me. I don’t want it to be different, I want it to be mine. And as I grow toward greater individuality, my work, I hope, will keep pace with that and grow in that direction. It will remain true to, and reflect, its origins.
In the same way that there are people that want to create a masterpiece without putting in the effort and focus to become a master, so to are there people that want their work to be original, and therefore truly individual, without putting in the work to become, themselves, truly distinct individuals. I think, if we don’t think too hard about it, our work will reflect us, so long as we’re not actively trying to copy others. I think there’s a time for copying. It’s how we learn. And I think we will on some level, always be creating work that’s truly derivative because we’re all working with the same raw materials. The question that Jean-Luc Godard begs us to ask is not where are we getting our materials, but where are we taking them to?
Or that’s one of the questions. But there might be a deeper question still, and it begs exploring. Art can only go so far into individuality as the artist is willing, or able to take it. And while mastery of craft is important, that’s not what I’m talking about. I know we all believe we’re different and special, and Mom was right when she said there was no one like us and that we should just “be ourselves." But you’ve probably by now discovered that “just being ourselves” isn’t the whole story; that it’s really more a question of becoming ourselves, and that’s a lifetime of choices, not merely a willingness to accept the person we are. Because if you’re still the same person at 40 years old that you were at 4 years old, and you’ve not become more complex, more interesting, and more individual than you had the potential for as a child, then what you make is going to reflect that and won’t be the complex, interesting, or individual work you hope it is.
I think the focus on originality and the fear of derivation or imitation is missing the point. It’s not that it comes from a desire for too much, something unattainable, so much as it comes from wanting too little. Is that all we’re hoping for is merely to be different from others? Is that enough for you? And how much energy will we have to spend to do so? How much of our days and our focus will need to be directed at what those others are doing in order to be sure we’re not unwittingly becoming copy-cats? It’s probably healthy to remember that not being like others is not the same thing as being truly yourself.
I think Emerson was right. Like his, all my best thoughts have been stolen by those who preceded me. My thoughts aren’t purely my own. Even on this matter of originality, CS Lewis weighed in years ago, pre-echoing my own thoughts. He said “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
He’s saying originality will be a natural bi-product if the work you create is faithful to who you are and if you don’t focus on originality itself. So why is this so damn hard? Because it’s easier, by a factor of millions, to focus more on making original art than on becoming an original person. A more complex, fascinating, person that is truly themselves. It’s much harder to take all the other work of artists from every discipline, all the writers, the poets, the musicians, painters, great and divergent thinkers, and allow their work to transform us into the person we’re becoming, rather than merely copying their forms and allowing our lives to becoming more of an homage to our influences than a reflection of the distinct person they helped us become.
When it comes to quotes like the one about great artists stealing and not copying, the one I like best comes from author Dave Eggers in his book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He says, "“We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.” I prefer that to the idea of theft because you can steal an idea without it changing you. But we are, or we become what we eat. It transforms us. I’ll take transformation over petty larceny any day.
This is why it’s so important that we expose ourselves to influences that are diverse and divergent. I would be a very different person without the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the paintings of Monet or Canada’s Group of Seven, without the photography of Elliott Erwitt or the music of Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn. I’d be different without the years of travels and the experiences that have made me who I am, the learning I have pursued, and the people I’ve learned from. And as I move forward I will become more and more a product of all of those voices and ideas, and my reactions to them. And so will you.
As I was putting together the notes for this episode I was listening to the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. The photograph on the cover of that album was made by legendary New York photographer, Jay Maisel. There’s a story about Jay that I think ties nicely into this discussion. He was teaching a class in photography when one of his students asked him, “How do I make more interesting photographs” to which Jay replied without missing a beat, “Become a more interesting person.”
So with the implied permission of TS Eliot and Pablo Picasso, if you’re asking me how to create work that is more original, in other words, unmistakably you, then my stolen answer is: become a more unmistakable you. Don’t stop at stealing from others. Feed from them. Get hungrier. Ingest everything you can from every source that intrigues you and with which you resonate. Be curious and follow more threads. Be open-minded about ideas unfamiliar to you and divergent from your own. Learn everything you can and let it add to the complexity of whom you are becoming. Let it transform you.
Don’t worry about being original, don’t put your focus there. Put your focus on becoming an even richer, deeper, more complex version of the person you are. The more one of a kind the artist, the more original and one-of-a-kind the art becomes. Will it be derivative? Of course it will. Isn’t everything derived from something else? But is that what we’re most longing to ask? Isn’t what we really want to know both a little more complex and a little more freeing? Don’t you really want to find out, not where you got the raw materials but where you’re taking them? Aren’t we all hoping to discover not whether our work is derived from others, but whether it will become truly our own?
Thanks so much for joining me today. If you want more of this kind of thing to fuel your everyday creativity and freedom, my 2 new books were written for you. Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, and The Problem with Muses can both be found in all the usual places, like Amazon, or through the links at StartUglyBook.com, and both will support this podcast and help you get more reliably to Flow.
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Thanks so much for being part of this. I’m so humbled by your reviews and feedback. If you’d like to get in touch with me you can email me at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com and I’d love to hear from you. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0