Originality: A Soothing Lie

Or: Today I Wrote Fiction

All the stories we might ever tell have already been told. If you really think about it, there have only ever really been six stories, and all of them are really one story: Someone struggled, and things changed. All fictitious endeavor reduces down to those few, pithy words. You can’t change that; any attempt to do so veers into the absurd and ridiculous and nonsensical. There is one story. Always has been. Originality and invention are therapeutic fabrications. And, in a meta twist of self-indulgence, the fabrication of “originality” might be the only original thing we’ve ever invented. The idea that we even came up with the only story is the last original fiction, since the one story has always happened, and always will happen, in spite of us and with no requirement for our willing participation at all.

Someone struggled, and things changed. One story. All reality. No originality.

Which is an awfully stupid reason to stop writing.

So don’t stop writing.

Because, even though there’s only one story, we don’t understand it. A lot of smart people write stories, and some of them must have noticed that they basically spent their days and their millions of words repeating themselves — someone, someone, someone, struggle, struggle, struggle, change, change, change. Quite a few writers much smarter than I am must have thrown down their quills and cried out, “Forsooth! ’Tis an unfickle perpetuity, this. An echo of the last story so similar that they could be brothers. Cock… And I thought I was being clever.”

They were being clever. But they weren’t being original. Not that anyone has to be original. Clever is far and above more fun than originality any ol’ eon.

This mythic writer, after throwing down their quill, I hope always picked it back up again when they realized that their compulsion to tell some story or other was not mere self-indulgence.

I figured out the one story. But I know that I need to write it anyway. I need to write it over and over again. Someone struggled, and things changed. I need to tell that story again, and again, and again, because I don’t understand it. Not completely.

None of us do.

Or maybe…all of us do. On a soul level, somewhere behind where words live and above where we die. Maybe in that part of us we get that story.

We get the story. We get it that someone struggles, and things change. We get that.

And at the same time, we really don’t.

Which is why the point of telling a story — of writing a story and then of reading it — isn’t the story.

All stories are the same story. We know that. We don’t need to be told that again.

We need to answer the only relevant question. There is only one, real question in any story:

What someone struggles against what, to change which things in what ways?

Okay. So that’s kind of an over-complicated question. It sort of has to be. It encapsulates, in a sense, our entire relationship with stories.

There’s only one story. Intuitively, we know that. We’ve never invented a new story. Whenever we try, it turns out it’s the same story.

Yet we need to keep telling that story. Even though we know it already, we don’t understand it.

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