In this week’s un-planned and mainly unedited Sunday post, I wanted to share some thoughts about what is considered “truly unique” when we create something.
There is no need to overstate the fact there are millions of books and stories floating around the Earth at any given moment, be it sitting idly on a long-forgotten bookshelf or pages flying up in the sky after falling out of the family car during a road trip. Many of these books are created with a general ideal in mind, while others have that uncanny look of ripping off someone else’s precious work. If you read those books—the generally unique ones, that is—then you get a sense of individual pride the author has put into creating that tome of words and pages.
You may have noticed I used the words “generally unique.” That is because, I reckon, that many works today are not truly unique. Let me explain.
Borrowing From Others
Milton Berle said something along the lines that many comedians in his day stole each other’s jokes. If I remember, he said something along the lines of borrow someone else’s joke and make it your own. Now, I’m not saying everyone is a thief. Rather, I am saying that we borrow concepts and other common ideas from other influences, whether we do it consciously or not.
Sometimes, when we look to some others for inspiration to put into our own creations, we may borrow and adapt an idea of their own to advance ourselves. When you read two seemly distinct works, you sometimes get the odd feeling that you’ve read it before. Chances are, you probably have, and that’s alright. It’s not downright plagiarism—that would be copying word-for-word, literally. This is the more abstract concepts I am talking about, the ones that flow well to make a certain plot device work, or to enrich character development, for instance. We take that basic structure of whatever idea we got from the source material, and then we shape it to suit are needs.
When it comes to major elements, for instance, we use the real-world, and, again, other literary sources of power to work from. Tolkien’s language from Middle-Earth, Cirth, borrows from the real runic languages from the early periods of Earth’s history. As much as the elves and the dwarves and dragons that make up Middle-Earth, they are inspired from Norse and ancient Germanic folklore. Those individual building blocks came together to form the high fantasy that are in all of his works; and even if those building blocks are not truly original, he made it original by breathing life into their own histories and cultures. It became something regarded as traditional high or epic fantasy that has entertained generations for decades, and still do today. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth inspired countless others to create their own worlds of elves and dwarves and dragons, attributed to what essentially was his reimagining of those concepts.
If, you say, wrote a piece of fantasy with elves and magic battling an evil dragon, and credit as a completely unique piece, Gandalf will want to have a word with you, then wring you out with his enormously long beard. I imagine that those core concepts to your story, even if you did not read Tolkien’s works or watched any of the movies, are, at an abstract level, potentially attributable to him, and not the mythology he used to base Middle-Earth on. Furthermore, if you created some form of fantasy that’s bizarre or of some other niche sub-genre, there’s a good chance that, once again, in a highly-processed way, the inspirational basis of your story can be recursively traced back to Tolkien and beyond.
If you plot out novels or worlds/concepts of universes onto a mind map, and had done so for a sample of unique fantasy literature, the result may surprise you. If you were to plot, in general, a simple line that takes inspires creative ideas between works, with arrows, the lines would create an insane rats nest of lines intersecting each other. It would not surprise me, then, that a bubble named “Tolkien” or “Middle-Earth” would have a gargantuan set of lines with arrows pointing directly to it, with entities pointing to those entities, and so on.
I’m not an academic professor or an expert on the historical accuracy. I’m just brainfarting this as a mental exercise. However, I can tell you with reasonable legitimacy that there would be lines pointing out from the bubble named “Tolkien.” Those lines may point to other people or works earlier than him, or point those real-world Norse folklore and stories from the Middle Ages. Within a reasonable limit, even those entities, as literary sources go, may even have arrows branching off of it. It goes on…and on…and on…
Is What We Create Then “Truly Unique?”
For what seems like an eternity of creativity, we have been borrowing bits off each other and forming something of our own as a result, broadly speaking. From those sources, we create something unique, which, in turn, someone else will use that work for their own building blocks, turn it into something else. Whatever they create is definitely unique. That process continues on in a never-ending literary life-cycle that births something new each iteration. Our own imagination, the unique creativity part, fills in the gaps. Those building blocks we use to form our worlds and races and characters are just the wooden beams to build the barn. Our imagination supplies the nails and the glue. To give one example with Tolkien, I’d imagine, would be the living, sentient trees—the Ents. But, then again, the concept of Ents could possibly be traced to another piece of folklore or a fairy tail. Who knows at that point.
So, again: do we create something truly unique each time? The answer is definitely yes, and there is nothing to worry about. After all, if you create or refer to a language in your own world based off an old romantic language, you’re creating a direct link to that. It’s what you do with that building block that makes your concept unique, and that is what matters. We inherently know that, even without direct attribution, those abstract concepts and building blocks—whatever you want to call them—would not be around if it weren’t for those who created them based on others sources in the first place. We owe people like Tolkien a huge showing of gratitude, because, without Middle-Earth, our view or context of high fantasy could be much different today if it weren’t for him.
Can We Achieve True and Unique Creativity in one Work?
To put it bluntly, the answer is no. At least, not without an incredible amount of hard work involving a ton of research and hard mental labour. With fantasy, many of those mainstay concepts—magic, elves, dragons, and so on—are nearly set in stone. All we can do is just flex the mould a little. You would have to redefine those concepts completely in order to create a unique piece of fantasy. Even with science fiction, creating something standalone and unique, without drawing any lines to another source on that mind map, would be drastically difficult.
The human imagination is a truly wonderful and still not understood function of our brain. The thoughts we have, the unique creatures and trees we can make out of thin air—they may be truly unique. However, we sometimes need assistance making those thoughts a reality, either in a drawing, a description on paper, or in spoken word form. That is when we refer to those inspirational concepts from others. We use them to help shape those thoughts, to help give it substance, to give it life; and without that network and rats nest of features we rely on these days, I’d imagine any book without even the most remote of attributions would make a piece of work truly bland and unimaginative, and that would be a real shame.