Write What You No: How to be Original
NO! NO! NO!
My wife loves watching nighttime TV shows--cops, lawyers, doctors--and I hate them. With a passion that gets me into trouble with her all the time. I'll sit watching something for five minutes and I'm so stunned by the lack of originality that I roll my eyes, shake my head and walk out of the room . . . with the help of my wife's shoe thumping me in the back of the head. (That's a joke. She actually throws a waffle iron.)
"Originality is the art of concealing your sources." -- Benjamin Franklin
When I get an idea for a story, my impulse to make it mine--make it original--becomes Job One. And I hide the source of my idea by saying "no" to what's been told before. Granted, I can't always count on my idea being original. Sometimes someone else has the same idea. That doesn't eliminate it from being original if I turn an integral element of the story into my own.
In 1990, I wrote a short story called The Wowser and the Bangtail Muster about two couples on vacation in Alice Springs, Australia. My idea was to use a minor event I read in a newspaper about a soccer team lost in the outback. The driver of their van hit a kangaroo and, thinking it was dead, they put a coat and hat on it, stood it up between them and took a group photo. When it suddenly recovered, it ran off into the outback wearing the clothes. I took that idea and thought, No, it didn't just run off wearing clothes . . . .
In my story, the driver puts his hat and coat on the "dead" kangaroo, but when it runs off wearing it, they realize the car keys are in the coat pocket. They are stranded with darkness looming across the deep outback. I thought it was surprising and original. I still have the story, but I never tried getting it published.
Flash forward to 2002 and a movie called Kangaroo Jack, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Early in the film a mobster's two goons hit a red kangaroo in the outback near Alice Springs. Thinking it's dead, they put a coat and sunglasses on the kangaroo. When it suddenly becomes conscious, it runs off into the outback wearing the coat and sunglasses. In the pocket of the coat is $50,000.00. And the chase begins.
Someone associated with writing this script likely read the same article I did. They made it original by putting money in the pocket instead of keys. Still, I missed my opportunity to tell an original story.
That's all it takes to make it my own.
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
-- Herman Melville
A nun finds a bag of money on the side of a road near her convent.
No. The nun doesn't give the bag of money she finds to the cops.
No. She doesn't give it to the orphanage. What's original about that?
Once I get my attention on the microcosm of originality, I let my imagination take over. I ask myself, "What if . . . ?" And I allow my "No's" to lead me to an original idea.
Originality isn't dreaming up something no one ever thought of before. It's taking the usual and fashioning it to look like something else. Like turning an iron into a steam engine, or a pencil into a booster rocket.
Everything already exists. As a writer, I will tell a story that has been told, but I will do it in a new way. Old becomes new and the new is original. It has its "origins" in me.
The Irish poet, James Stevens, wrote: " Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself."
So what about the nun? She keeps driving. All the way to Las Vegas. To do something she's always wanted to do: hand it to the first big loser who walks out the door with the promise that he'll go back in and put it all on the crap table's PASS line.
Just a thought.
Posted by Tom Eubanks at 1/26/2011 7:17 PM 
Categories: On Writing
Tags: Essay Storytelling Working It
Categories: On Writing
Tags: Essay Storytelling Working It
And that's how Warren Buffet got his original seed money.
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You mean the Warren Buffet who was a corn farmer? That's a lot of seed.
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