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Creative,
groundbreaking, fresh. These words follow behind practically every single creative
artist and sticks in their head like an earworm. I know I was stuck in that
sinkhole. Art is made to be shared, and when you share it, you might end up
thinking about how creatively groundbreaking and fresh people will find your
writing, drawings, sculptures, or whatever. Why? There’s “good” art and “bad”
art, and when people want “good” art, said three things almost always seem to
be on the top of their list. But there’s that one word that haunts the creative
types such as myself. Originality. Yes, the desire to be original and to break
trends is intoxicating. Or it can be, depending on who you are. Not just to
create something new and make something good, but to not make the same thing
that that guy over there made. With companies and indie creators pushing out so
many fantastic and really horrible products, it’s sometimes hard to make your
own project that won’t make your audience say, “Hey, such-and-such obscure
person you’ve never heard of already did that, you plagiarist.” It’s not easy
in the Information Age to create without the nagging sense that you didn’t come
up with it yourself. Or worse, that someone took your idea. Personally, I don’t think it’s that simple.
First
thing’s soonest. Total originality is impossible, and when I learned that, it
wasn’t an easy pill to swallow. My comics teacher, Jerzy Drozd, is almost
always the one I look to for any info on comics. And he said that if something
were 100% original, it would be outside human experience, ergo impossible to
understand. Everything is based on something else, ergo nothing is “truly
original” in the sense the word’s chucked around. He and his friends, Mark
Rudolph and Kevin Cross, ran a podcast, Art and Story, in which they debunked
the public concept of artistic originality many times. Many times.
But
still I, a young, frustrated artist at the time, didn’t want to believe that
what I created would never be “truly original.” But Mr. Drozd would always say
that in just doing the work, you’d learn to put your own personal spin on whatever
you were doing. Still though, that wasn’t good enough for me, and I was quickly
growing sick of making something up and spending a ton of time on it only to
find some guy I’ve never heard of who’d done it better. So I forced previously
good stories to go in strange, usually uncomfortable places in their direction,
trying somehow to make them new and interesting, a thing no one had ever seen
before. As was and is my want, I overthought things to the extreme. It was
gonna be big, it was gonna be awesome, it was gonna change the comics industry,
blow the doors off of everything. I was going to be on TV and make ten movies,
because what I’d written was so fantastically, extraordinarily, and undeniably
original.
Of course, when it
got down to it, all my comics (and other stories, I might add) ended up
sounding like perfect pieces of the 90’s comic scene: pretentious, no tangible
love for the projects, and just feeling like nothing but a snatch for the
quickest buck. The 90’s being the decade of some of the worst American comics
in American comics history, you can imagine how “good” that was. Discouraged by
the results, I didn’t think I could ever really make a good, solid, original
story.
It didn’t always bother
me when I wasn’t totally original, and once, I did take pride in similarities
between my work and a much more well-known author. The phrase, “great minds
think alike,” came to mind, and the thought made me think too hard about it.
Why? Why did we
think alike? We’d never met, we’d probably never had the same list of favorite
books, we had thoroughly different upbringing. Why did we have the same idea?
I’d developed the same idea in isolation of one of the greats, and he’d
developed it in isolation of me. So how was this possible? How could we both be
original on the same subject of the same thing? Was my original stance on
originality misinformed, if not, just dead wrong? At the time, I couldn’t think
of a logical answer that satisfied me, so I let my left-brain explain it for
me.
Perhaps our
imaginations were linked. Well, maybe not linked, but part of the same world, a
different kind of world than the concrete one corporeal humans exist in. Maybe
there’s a whole world where our subconscious states existed. The more I thought
about it, I decided maybe they lived like nomads. But like strategically
travelling ones, ones that never slept. And they wouldn’t live in houses made
of wood or stone like humans do. There would be lands of ideas where our
subconscious states could inhabit. And just like normal people, these
subconscious versions of ourselves would be drawn to certain spots. Certain
people would travel back and forth amongst dozens of different interests. To
bring it back around, maybe this author and I, despite having never met each
other, traveled the same route in this subconscious world.
When I thought
about this, I could see how, yes, my previous stance on originality had to be
wrong. My teacher was right; we couldn’t possibly be “truly original,” because
everything is based on something else. But looking at it like this, for some
reason, made me realize that my own creative take on the same thing would make
it fresh. I wasn’t copying or being copied, and anything I made probably wasn’t
going to become in any way groundbreaking, but the thing that made it what I
wanted was the fact that I had made it myself. Ergo, originality.
