Every Thought That's In My Head, Someone Else Has Said

I'm a child of the media, like a lot of people my age. I love to watch TV, listen to the radio, go to movies, read magazines and surf the Internet. I love being entertained but I also love information. It's fun to learn about new things, people, places, schools of thought in all areas. I enjoy keeping current with the news in all areas; politics, sports, social issues, mass media, weird news stories, the whole gamut.


There's a bit of an inherent danger in that though. I'm a writer, and a writer has to be original in his ideas. You have to constantly come up with new and unique themes and ways in which to present them. Anyone can type out old, stale ideas that have been used and rehashed over and over, whether they are essays, poems, short stories, reviews or novels. A truly successful writer has not only his own voice but his own fully realized original concepts to create.

In order to ensure this originality, you have to not only have a good imagination but you also have to be sure that no one has "beat you to the punch" so to speak, by posting or publishing those ideas before you have a chance to. In this day of blogging and self publishing, that's getting to be an increasingly difficult task. The instant anything happens anywhere in the world someone is commenting on it. It's almost impossible to see a movie these days without being tipped off to key plot developments by trailers, spoilers or just plain old word of mouth. Blogs are multiplying like cells in a Petri dish, so much so that even if you insulate yourself from them chances are at some point you will see your "original" thought has already been explored by someone, somewhere.

Should all of this be totally dispiriting? Does it mean that it's impossible to ensure an original creative thought? Well, no, though the new technology certainly does complicate things. I guess one way to guard against "thought duplication" or even being influenced by others' ideas is to completely ignore and avoid news in all forms; network and cable TV news, internet news, blogs, radio. But there's an obvious Catch-22 here; if you isolate yourself from the world and its goings on, how are you going to be able to write about it, or at least anything that is relevant? Sure you don't have to be a news junkie in order to write a love poem or an elegy, but in order to give your imagination fuel you can't constantly consume stale sources of brain food. Inspiration is very often fired by current events, and there isn't a writer alive who isn't influenced by other writers' content as well as style. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's only when the influence begins to drown out your personal voice or vision that the exposure turns from inspiration into contamination.

So what's the ultimate answer? You can't hide yourself from reality in order to ensure that your ideas are truly your own, and writing from a vacuum is destined to produce empty material that may be original runs the risk of also being hollow and detached from relevancy. But a writer also must be able to stand on his own, create his own voice and be assured that he's not just rehashing what others have said before.

Maybe the only reasonable response is to write what you want while being completely aware that you are being influenced and using that to your own advantage. We've all heard that there are only about seven different stories to be told anyway, but that they can be told in nearly infinite ways. Perhaps modern writers should apply this logic to their daily labors, choosing whatever topics they want and making the profusion of information at their disposal to their own advantage. I am limited to the amount of colors I have available to paint my house, for instance, but ultimately, it's the WAY that I paint that house that makes it an individual effort, that puts my own unique stamp upon the task. Similarly, just as I may only have such much editorial or narrative content to choose my topics from, it's my own individual slant on that content that makes it worthwhile. The fact that my neighbor may have used a light blue paint in his house doesn't mean that if I use it I'm somehow just mimicking him. Maybe my shade is just a tad darker or maybe I used a different base, or maybe I used it in my living room whereas his is in the kitchen. And while my neighbor may write a futuristic detective novel, his may be purely inspired by the works of Ray Bradbury while mine might be a means by which I'm exploring something that happened in my childhood.

There may truly be "nothing new under the sun", but just as our own interactions with nature function to not only put our own stamp upon the world but also remake it in a sense, so too does our mining what we see and hear in our daily lives (including that which comes to us via the mass media) function to individualize our own work, and ourselves.