| Re: Some Musings on Originality (and Style)
Teresa, thanks for posting this. And sorry it's taken me so long to post a comment. Again, I take a lot of reassurance from what you say. The world and stories I have now grew from a very short story I wrote when I was 17. Over the past ten years I have slowly built a world and the outline of a story-structure for a series of novels. I feel that you could probably pick almost any single idea from it, though (or, its 'main theme', such as it is), and find it lacking in originality. I have always clung to the idea that originality emerges out of the synthesis. and also that the execution is far more important than the idea. No matter how good any of my ideas were initially, I really didn't know what I was doing. Things have emerged out of the process, as I have learned and improved, that I could never have imagined back then. No doubt there will be many more (I do hope so).
I found the whole article really inspiring. More generally, the things you say make it clear that this isn't a lottery we're in, that our destiny is in our own hands (to a large degree).
The challenge is to become good enough. |