Originality, Fanfiction, and a Few Other Things
Originality is something that is prized in modern-day fiction, at the very same time it is proclaimed to be impossible. You can find innumerable web pages and writing books that tell you solemnly that “there is nothing new under the sun,” that “there are no more original stories… everything written today is a sort of riff on previous stories,” and that “you can’t come up with a basic plot that has never been done before.” And then, in the next paragraph, these same essayists go on to say “but it has never been done your way,” or they talk about the “appealing freshness” of the latest retelling of “Beauty and the Beast,” or assert that originality is the (totally impossible) only way to achieve distinction in fiction.
This leaves a lot of authors in a bind. On the one hand, originality is held up as an absolute, fundamental prerequisite for high quality writing (and this is further reinforced by the attitude of modern society toward plagiarism). On the other hand, any author who stops to think clearly for more than a few minutes will have to recognize that after some four thousand years of recorded human history and storytelling, finding an original story to tell, or something new to say about the human condition, is going to be nearly impossible.
People have different reactions to this realization. Some are completely horrified whenever they (inevitably) discover that someone else has written something similar to their story, to the point of destroying whole manuscripts. Others come to an uneasy detent with the whole idea – a sort of head-in-the-sand, don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. Still others blithely ignore the whole issue, or pretend to (apart from the occasional 3 a.m. crisis of conscience).
There is, however, one group of writers who are totally untroubled by the whole modern idea that complete originality is some kind of benchmark for quality. I refer, of course, to writers of fanfiction.
Fanfiction, as I have pointed out elsewhere, can be looked at as a sort of map of various alternate routes through the implied decision tree that the original writer used. The whole point is that it’s not purely original in itself; it has to have something to be an alternative to, or an expansion of.
There is a lot of very good writing in fanfiction. And plenty of bad, too; Sturgeon’s Law most definitely applies – 90% of everything is crud. But that last 10% can be very, very good, and in at least some cases, I think one reason is that the writers do not have to angst about “being original” – at least, not as long as they write fanfiction.
And it isn’t new, not by a long, long shot. From where I sit, I can see an entire bookcase full of fiction dating from the twelfth century to the present, all spinning off from a few scraps of history and legend pulled together into The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth. For the next three centuries, authors from Britain and France to Russia retold and expanded and elaborated the Matter of Britain in ways that a modern reader of fanfiction would recognize instantly, until Sir Thomas Mallory pulled most of it together in the Unified Field Theory that was Le Morte d’Arthur. Going farther back, one could, I think, make a good case for Virgil’s Aeneid being Homeric fanfiction.
The best retellings and reframings can stand on their own, but a knowledge of the original story makes them richer. You don’t have to be familiar with Romeo and Juliet to understand and enjoy West Side Story, but knowing Shakespeare adds a level of appreciation to the modern play. (And of course Shakespeare was adapting and retelling a couple of earlier stories that nobody would remember if they weren’t his sources. Nobody complains about plagiarizing something if your rewrite is better than the original…)
All of which leads me to the conclusion that the urge to retell and reframe existing stories is a fundamental human impulse that comes right along with the one to tell stories in the first place. Originality is not the be-all and end-all of literary quality; it is simply one of the many and several ingredients that writers use to create stories. Some stories need more of it than others; some need it in particular places but not in others. Ringing changes on familiar stories like Cinderella can be fun, and just as “original” and creative as making something up out of whole cloth.
