Originality and nostalgia…
[A message to readers: I hope these blog posts inform and entertain you during these troubling times. I will keep writing them as long as I can. Considering our tri-state area is the COVID-19 epicenter now, I believe it’s not if but when most everyone around here, including me, becomes ill with this damn virus. Everyone is in danger. A large percentage of cases here are less than forty-four-years-old. We still don’t know much about the virus, how it affects different ages and genders, but it’s more lethal than the flu. So stay smart, be safe, and, if you must socialize, use the internet. Hopefully these posts will add to your experience there. Now here’s the post….]
It’s said that there are only so many plots. Accepting that, originality in how those plots are spun is key: the Devil’s always in the details.
This modern definition of originality is an acceptable one. You can’t copyright a generic plot, after all. We can look back on those Greek dramas or Shakespeare’s plays and find commonality with many current stories. It’s okay to repeat those generic plots as long as the author’s version is a bit different, i.e. original.
But what about that recent nostalgia movement that repeats more recent works? Why is a Broadway musical like Oklahoma put back on the stage again? Or why are musical biopics like Beautiful or Jersey Boys so popular? Little Women now has its fourth cinematic incarnation! And is Disney’s animated feature to Broadway stage to streaming video and computer-generated reality just money-grabbing exploitation of audiences? And the laughs on the remakes of All in the Family and The Jeffersons are mostly from people who saw the originals—people not born yet during the original airings probably don’t care and probably don’t understand what’s funny.
Nostalgia is probably originality’s worst enemy. It even affects tech. The current fad over old LPs and Steve Job’s signed floppy are examples where nostalgia leads to extolling old, inferior technology. I don’t agree that LPs sound better, and I don’t care about Job’s floppies or anyone else’s—I got rid of all of mine, although I still distrust computer clouds. I do have some LPs, but only because I can’t find their equivalents in CDs (yeah, I know, even those are disappearing, but I don’t trust iTunes completely as an archive for my favorite music either).
In the book world, there are revivals of old books all the time. Just slap the “classic” label on a book and there’ll be readers who buy it. Never mind that the stories have plots with modern alternatives in books that are more current and meaningful today. No one cares about how blubber is turned into lamp oil, yet Moby Dick is essentially a manual on how to do just that, and it’s forced upon unsuspecting high schoolers all too often. Instead, we should read stories about how to protect whales…and the need to do so. That’s why Star Trek IV is a better story than Moby Dick! (Yeah, I know—high school English teachers will cry “foul!” here. They almost succeeded in making me hate “literature,” though, so I always take their opinions with a grain of salt.)
Actually, nostalgia and originality aren’t complete opposites. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have historical fiction. There the setting often creates a bit of nostalgia—readers can get their kicks by traveling to a previous time—ideal for escapists and history buffs alike. But the fiction that fills the gaps between the historical facts still has to be an original story, one we might have heard before done in a different way.
Nostalgic literature can often be escapist, which is why so much written in the romance genre is nostalgic. Not my cuppa tea, but to each his own. Perhaps the popularity of the romance genre, along with mysteries and thrillers, is because we need a mental escape from our dreary physical lives and/or the stressful current times we live in. Those escapist stories have to seem real, of course (so many romance novels don’t satisfy that criteria), and add new features to similar stories already written.
Even sci-fi often suffers from lack of originality. While its stories don’t go back as far as Moby Dick (with a few exceptions), they’ve been around for a while—first contact, space exploration, future warfare, dystopian societies, apocalyptic events, and so forth. Again, the only way to do something original often reduces to using an old plot with clever new details. As an avid reader of sci-fi—I’ve read most of the pioneering works—I often find young authors haven’t added anything really new. Space opera is the worst in this respect, and often trends toward fantasy in its lack of science (for example, every Star Wars movie).
Being original now is truly challenging. There are so many good books and good authors that it’s hard to give a new spin to an old plot because other authors have already done so, and done it well, sometimes many years earlier.
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Comments are always welcome.
Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! This is my longest title, but not my longest novel—and has both direct and hidden meaning. It’s the last novel in the Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, all three books sold as a bargain ebook bundle. Read together, the reader will experience centuries of future history, going from a dystopian Earth run by multinational corporations and policed by their mercenaries; to first contact out among the stars and saving a strange collective intelligence; and finally to this story of how a psychotic industrialist schemes to take over all of near-Earth space (this is my bow to Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and this villain is my Mule). Available in .mobi (Kindle) format at Amazon and in all ebook formats at Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Taylor, Gardners, etc.). Hours of reading entertainment.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
