if i can't make anything new, then why the hell am i here?

substack put me into an echo chamber and i'm too concerned with an originality that doesn't exist

‘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.’

                — C.S Lewis

1.   THE GRIEVANCE

I have been trying to write about this for years. I wrote it first—in terrible form—on my original blog in 2021, then I decided to adapt it for a YouTube video which I proceeded to film and then discard and now I’ve been sitting on this in my drafts for months because I couldn’t figure out how to express myself. Safe to say, this plagues me a bit.

My grievance is with originality and the seemingly impossible task of achieving it.

Often I find my issue with writing for this platform is that I’m trying to find something new to say. Eventually I’ll come on and begin writing something I thought about sharing, then I’ll take a break and switch over to the explore tab and right there on my feed is an essay about the very thing I’ve been typing away at, and oftentimes I feel it’s better than I could ever write myself. I wrestle with two choices: the click on and the click away. I feel curious, obviously, as to what is being written, but I have this terrible belief deep within me that once I’ve seen it, my work becomes a copy. Maybe this is all an individual symptom of my deep rooted fear of plagiarism, or maybe everyone feels this way.

But sometimes it feels like the world is too huge, and I am too normal, to say anything new.

2.   THE ECHO CHAMBER AND THE WHOLE COPYING THING

The whole copying thing is part of this grievance of mine. Part of me is so terrified of accidental plagiarism that I forget how important it is to keep reading. If I decide to make the choice not to click on an essay or read a book, I’m hurting myself by staying stuck in my little bubble. But also, it feels like I’m in a bubble anyway.

Halfway through writing this piece I read this post by

elisa

titled i want to be bored. I loved it in many ways, but this quote especially spoke to me:

‘sure, i often feel inspired by things that i see online and that maybe are trendy in some way but i’m talking about when i constantly see the same things over and over and when people become all clones of each other, like for example reading the same romance books with the same annotations and buying the same makeup and i don’t want to be a part of that.’

Substack and the wider internet has fed into our human desire to fit into the pack and be loved and admired by the people around us. Write that girlhood essay, dye your hair and buy that dress and you will get views, I swear.

The best type of practice to grow your skills as an artist is often through emulation, and I fear sometimes that we forget that the technique should usually be used privately. I worry the risk is that despite its negative connotation, ‘copycats’ are not always working from a bad place. Nowadays writers—including myself—are posting their work online earlier and earlier into their creative endeavours and these precious years of experimentation are being exposed to the internet. It’s so easy to create a small community of readers who will like your work in its early-stage ‘copycat’ form, and so potentially you may never grow out of it. For a while I stagnated here, but through making sure I sought out work from people outside of my old niche, I was able to be free of it and develop I style I think is true to myself.

eliza mclamb

’s essay Everyone’s Writing Sounds the Same Now is hard not to reference too:

‘If something seems like a sure shot to the top, there will always be people wanting to plug-and-play what worked for someone else and try to ride the coattails of someone’s better, more original idea. The good news is that even an amateur nose can smell a copycat right away, and we therefore mostly elevate the superior talents and hopefully make space for the aspirational ones to keep getting better.’

The hotly debated Substack ‘it girl’ complex and the seeming desire for both writers and non-writers to want to conform to the perceived ideal state is feeding into this fear I have of being unoriginal. Though I reject the idea completely, in a weird way it almost seems necessary to conform now if you want to grow your audience. In an age where it’s so easy to fall into the trend cycle, I feel that parts of Substack are falling into repetition. I do like the girlhood essays and also the counter-culture critiques of them, but I’m growing tired, and I find myself less willing to read them. Even if the work is different, it feels unoriginal at times in the sense that the platform can easily become an echo chamber of debating the same base topic.

My goal here has always been to publish my writing when I feel like it. But also, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t have any desire to grow my following, and the easiest way to do that is by feeding into these trend cycles and becoming a copy of the most popular. I crave something new, and I’m sure most of you do too, but discovering and creating that ‘new’ thing is hard and often barely rewarded as the majority of people do want to keep reading what they know. Sometimes it feels like forgoing originality is the best way to achieve growth.

But as Mclamb says, there’s a fakeness to the copycat that usually you can recognise. I think this feeling stems from the lack of heart or emotional depth, and that’s what I’ve come to believe creates an original piece.

While I’ve been writing my novel I’ve been seeking out books with similar themes and prose styles to try and learn what I like and dislike about them and apply them in my own work, but sometimes they send me further down a path of despair than hope. I recommended Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over in my monthly wrap-up in March, but what I didn’t say was how deeply it scared me. For a regrettable moment I considered scrapping my own novel because of small, tiny similarities between Marcken’s work and my own. Now, what its taught me is that there’s a place for writing with the same thematic setting. I went back and re-read the book after figuring this out and now I can clearly see just how different the two works are, because the authors themselves are different.

Artists, and writers especially, bring a lot of themselves into the work. I know that some try not to, but I do feel that’s close to impossible. Your prose choices and grammatical quirks are made up of all that you’ve read and hated and loved and they’re hard to forgo, so why should you? That’s the ‘you’ in the piece, isn’t it? And if you’re true to yourself instead of putting on an aesthetic performance, then you will bleed into it enough to make it something so-called original.

3.   EVERYTHING HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE AND THAT’S OKAY!

Maybe it’s more than okay. Maybe it’s the best part.

I suppose I now think about this—or I try to—in an absurdist way. In the whole who cares anyway, we’re all going to die but that’s the freeing part so we may as well just enjoy everything.

Maybe it is quite telling that I think I have quoted more people in this post than I have in any other piece I’ve posted, but maybe that’s the point; taking in other people’s ideas—carefully—and using them to form your own rather than avoiding them all together. After all, how else do you learn?

I think I’ve been thinking about originality too much and it’s holding me back from writing. I’ve been wanting everything I make to be revolutionary and never seen before. My problem is thinking too deeply about that core meaning. You can strip every piece of work down to its bare bones and define them with just a few words, but does that really mean that the latter is any less original? You can say both The Kiss by Gustav Klimt and The Lovers by Rene Magritte are about a kiss, and yet they’re both exponentially different paintings because of who has painted them. Both artists bring a sense of self and experience and that is where originality is born.

left to right: The Kiss and The Lovers

Maybe I’m thinking too much like a critic, or an editor. In university I’m taught to read into the minutiae of each piece I write, read and edit; into its form and prose and grammar and on and on. But after a while I think I need to learn to not take that into every aspect of my work. Sometimes you need to step back and appreciate the beauty for what it truly is.

It has all been done before! We will never stop! 

This piece has probably been written before! Dare I say THE reason we love most art is because it resonates with us and invokes that deep emotional pull. So, there will be so, so much that overlaps; so much love that we share.

I have written poems about the same moments as every other poet. Every painting, play, movie, book, song—it’s almost never truly new. It’s all about the same beautiful things and maybe that’s where this issue ends. Is there not something so warming about the fact that we make the same art over and over and never tire of it? That our tiny human minds will write poems about the sunrise and songs about the people we love for a millennia.

So, I am trying, desperately, to consume delicately and carefully because I cannot really make anything new, but that’s not exactly the point is it? To bring it all back to that C.S Lewis quote at the beginning; you are the missing piece in the puzzle, your experiences and choices as an artist are what makes a piece ‘original.’ If you just focus on creating something true to yourself, you will be alright.

I’ll leave you with a parting quote, one my novel writing teacher left my class with at the end of this past semester.

‘Nobody puts thoughts together like you do.’

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