Keeping Originality In Perspective

Last post I explored why people are obsessed with originality to dysfunctional degrees.  I noted that there were factors of individuality, a desire to be industrious, a sense of property, a desire for notoriety, and a focus on making a contribution.  All these factors lead to an emphasis on originality in media work in my opinion.  Let me also note that I think all too often originality gets over emphasized.

Yes, in short I am saying that people and groups and cultures can take an emphasis on originality too far.  That may sound strange, but an obsession with something good does not mean one puts it into practice properly.  I feel fear of unoriginality crushes people's creativity, destroying the very thing they're seeking.



Creativity is about imagining and dreaming and seeing new things or seeing things anew.  It cannot be easily bounded or described or ruled, and all of us know that moment where creativity burns hot like a star in our heads.  But if we subject this process to a checklist of what is "original", checking it for originality against everything anyone else has done, we kill it.  We slow the process, damn the creative flow, and dim that star that shines so brightly.

The "checklist" approach, where we suddenly fear that the products of our incandescent imagination are somehow unoriginal, eliminates new ideas as they don't meet whatever half-baked criteria we had.  Ideas die or are twisted to fit some definition of originality that has nothing to do with the creative spark that spawned them.  Creativity is killed by the very desire for it.

The fear of unoriginality only makes more unoriginality, a frustrated people slay or mutilate or isolate ideas as they don't fit their criteria for being original.

Worst of all sometimes we don't want something unique or new, and neither does our audience – making the quest for originality even more ironic.  We're not always in the mood for a new dish, sometimes we want a movie or video game thats a lot like something we loved.  Originality is not always desired – or even appropriate (I don't want my doctor getting all imaginative on me when the mood strikes her).

We want comfort or familiarity or a variant on a theme or something that's not new and different.  That's fine.  That's human.  That's OK.  Originality is not always what we want.

So where does this leave originality?  It leaves it as a laudable goal with its own place in creative endeavors.  Just not the only goal or the greatest goal depending on what you're doing and what people want.

Things that are unique and new have their places.  There are times such things are needed – vitally needed – and other times they are not.  It is best that creative people accept that originality has its place and ask themselves what place it should have in their works, and their lives, and then be happy with their decision.

So let us have our repetitious fantasy novels and our mind-bendingly original video games. Let us enjoy the latest giant monster film so much like the last along with innovative comic books that tell stories in ways we never saw.  Let us laud originality as a good goal but not the only one, and one who like any thing, an obsession over can make us unahppy.

And then let us go what we do best, original and unoriginal, creative and repetitious, and enjoy ourselves and share what we're good at with others.

- Steven Savage

Steven Savage Steven Savage (2027 Posts)

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.


  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a5823410970b www.genjipress.com

    It sounds to me like what you are advocating is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach to innovation. This is actually a very good idea: the conceit that innovation needs to come in stages that are connected directly to what we have right now, and not be such radical breaks from tradition that they are unrecognizable. Or, really, that both have their place — although it’s the incremental innovators who will stand to be most immediately accepted and recognized.
    One of my favorite films of all time is Seven Samurai, in part because it aggregated a lot of separate story conceits that had never been woven together into the same film, and made them complement each other. The building of a team (which has been echoed since then in every heist/caper movie ever made); the way the protectors and the protected have ambivalent feelings about each other; the way action is used to express character; etc. But because the whole film is a perfectly coherent, recognizable story, it doesn’t feel like some avant-garde innovation; it’s innovative in a subtle way.
    Compare that against something like Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” which came years later but had no less of an impact on filmmaking and filmmakers. At the time, people were bitterly divided over it: they called it incoherent and aimless. Today, we take hatchet editing and non-linear storytelling for granted on prime-time TV; that’s how far those revolutions of visual vocabulary have reached into the mainstream. But it took a long time for that to happen; it took a few generations of films, filmmakers and audiences to accept it as standard stuff.
    Look at this year’s big groundbreaker, “Inception.” In the abstract, it’s an elaborate heist noir, complete with a hero who’s got a troubled past and just wants to go home with clean hands. It’s the mechanics and details that were new — and also how those things were used, in turn, to further transform the meaning of everything we saw. (It wasn’t just that it was set in a dreamscape, but that said dreamscape was used as a way to further the insight we gain into everyone involved.) (And yes, I do feel the movie’s kind of prosaic at times, but that to me wasn’t a deal-killer.)
    There’s never anything wrong with telling a good story in a robust and memorable way. It’s an underrated skill, because through that you can connect with your audience’s hearts and really keep ‘em coming back. But there’s also got to be room for a least one step in a new direction, somewhere.

  • http://www.stevensavage.com/ Steven Savage

    I’m not advocating that entirely – there is a time for both the same-old-same-old and the shocking revelation. But the evolutionary approach is definitely one people need to consider and its frankly overlooked.
    The importance of the evolutionary approach is often lost as evolutionary works are usually either lunmped into the original and unoriginal categories by people. People miss their very importance as a bridging element because of binary thinking.
    Star Wars? Incredibly unoriginal, seen it all before, but it was very important culturally and media-wise. It was evolutionary. Avatar is the same way – it’s a common series of tropes but it used revolutionary techniques. They were bridges.
    Its also easy to forget something revolutionary was so in time. Snow White may not seem original, but it was, at the time, an insanely chancey, unexpected film that took a lot of risks and did a lot of things differently.
    Things can also be forgotten. How many people remember the influence of RUR – which gave us the word Robot AND speculated on bioengineering of artificial life? The Lensman series gave us insane-level space opera and isn’t heard of nearly as much as other properties.
    Realizing the place of originality is tough indeed.
    OK this turned into a bit of a ramble, but I think I’m going to get more posts out of this . . .

  • kiki

    Thanks for the enlightenment on what originality and creativity are…. I nearly got that star dimmed out completely.