Originality is Overrated

The goal of the panel topics seemed to be to shake things up, be controversial and have fun. Check, check, and check. The panelists themselves came up with some topics, which will likely become a tradition considering how great they were.

The first was “Originality is Overrated”,¹ devoted to the concept that no one creates in a vacuum and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Justine pointed out that truly “original” work would be unreadable, or at least impossible for the reader to identify with. Picasso said “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

This panel featured the first appearance of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor of the SF line at Tor Books. He and his wife Teresa also run the Making Light blog/hive mind, which I read for years until embarking on my Low-Information Diet.

Patrick got things off to a rousing start by suggesting that a completely reliable tactic for getting a new project going is by stealing from Shakespeare, which is brilliant for two reasons. First, he’s in the public domain.² Second, his plays are full of the themes, plots and character types that are now considered standards across the fiction world, but the actual situations are alien enough nowadays that you’re unlikely to steal note-for-note and instead use the concepts to organize your own ideas.

Scott confessed that the UGLIES series is essentially a four-book, 350,000-word reworking of a Twilight Zone episode called “Number 12 Looks Just Like You“. This demonstrates one of the concepts the whole panel seemed to agree on: take a familiar idea and then use it as a springboard to leap beyond. Scalzi referred to using an SF trope as “throwing the reader a lifeline.” Of course, if the lifeline constitutes your entire story, you’re not adding much value, are you?

Take pride in your heritage, as well; Patrick sells Scalzi’s OLD MAN’S WAR as “the best 50’s SF of the 21st century.” Take pride even if you do it terribly: Scott believes the original Dracula story becomes better through contrast with the hundreds of hack jobs that have come since, and occasionally someone will take it to a new level. Justine submitted Scott’s own PEEPS, where vampirism is due to a parasite, as a prime example; I would add Christopher Moore’s BLOODSUCKING FIENDS, which I believe is the first book to use electroplating as a vampire defense.

Patrick pointed out an example where someone got it half-right and half-wrong: the movie Shaun of the Dead. The first half, where the world is being overrun by zombies and nobody notices because the zombies are urban drones who acted essentially the same when they were alive, is brilliant because of all the things it pokes fun at, while the second half is just another zombie movie.

Panelist and comic book writer Doselle Young³ described the difficulties working on existing characters with enormous folklore. His epiphany that “you can’t punch everything” led him to consciously craft stories that turned familiar super-hero situations on their heads. One of his stories had a suspect dying as a result of being interrogated with Wonder Woman’s magic lasso, bringing into question the morality of forced confessions.

Scalzi summed up the Prime Directive this way: steal well, don’t steal thoughtlessly. Don’t do what I did in college: write a 300-page apocalypse novel and have your First Reader describe it as “Just like THE STAND,⁴ only not as good.” Oops.

Pick some familiar trope and consciously do something different with it: turn it on its head, contradict the central tenet, reduce it to absurdity. Attach it to a situation where the standard “story” won’t work, then find a new one that does.

There were some great non-originality-related comments on this panel, as well. Justine’s observation that “SF literalizes metaphors” particularly hit home for me, since my current project involves a character who literally bursts into flames when she gets angry. Doselle described his interest as “a collision between the fantastic and the personal,” which to me says it all. Mainstream fiction is missing the former and lots of bad SF/F is missing the latter, but the good stuff has to have both.

Next up, John Scalzi: The Good Parts Version.

1. Applies to blog post titles, too [↩]
2. While Steamboat Willie isn’t, which is a topic we’ll get back to on a later panel [↩]
3. Wonder Woman, Superman, and many others [↩]
4. My favorite Stephen King book BTW [↩]