Blogocentric Formulations

The Great Blog-Off - Prompt 2

*Written as part of "Invalid Item" 

Prompt: In high school my friend pointed out to me that humans can never create anything new; everything they create is a product of other created things. For example a unicorn is just a horse with a horn on it's head it isn't truly new, she argued. What do you think about this concept? Do you think she's right or wrong? How does this apply to you as a writer? (Remember that every story is just a different combination of 26 letters!)

I've always had a problem with the argument that "everything's been done before." Sure, maybe that's technically true if you break a story down into its simplest and most general narrative form, but then by that logic there's no such thing as a unique human being either, since we're all just the same basic molecules of carbon and merely different combinations and sequences of the same cytosine, guanine, thymine, and adenine (a.k.a. DNA) building blocks.

I suppose the real issue here is that while the idea of creations being merely different reconfigurations of already existing things may be true in a literal sense, it's not necessarily true in a figurative sense. The law of conservation of matter (that's right, I'm getting all physics-al on you! ) states that matter and energy can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed; it must always remain constant. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last time anyone actually created something from nothing dates back to the whole, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" thing... And so, in that sense, it's true from both a scientific and faith-based standpoint that you literally cannot create something new; the best you can hope for is a different combination of what's already in existence. Which I suppose is exactly what you get when Baz Luhrmann puts his own personalized stamp on the adaptations for Romeo & Juliet or The Great Gatsby, and what you get when Jay-Z and Linkin Park do a mash up of "Numb" and "Encore" for their 2004 collaboration album Collision Course.

However, there's also a pretty hefty weight on the other side of the scales. Well, maybe not as much as a law of physics and the power of God, but if nothing new is truly new... why does copyright law allow content creators to register their works as new works? When Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith re-imagined Shakespeare's classic The Taming of the Shrew as a high school story that eventually became the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, it was registered as a new work. They didn't need Shakespeare's permission to write it; they certainly don't have to pay Shakespeare a license fee or a royalty from their earnings!

"But Jeff, Shakespeare's work is in the public domain!" You say. Okay, fine. Look at any of those books that reference a specific, limited number of narrative plots in existence: Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots, Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, or the very simple four conflicts (man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself, man vs. society) referenced in Judith Simpson's Foundations of Fiction. According to those books, there are a finite number of plots out there and yet multiple examples of how each of these has been explored in different ways. At their heart, Stephen King's book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the film The Day After Tomorrow, and the current television show Revolution are all inherently a 'man (or woman) vs. nature' story, and yet the United States Copyright Office has ruled that each of those stories is unique, original to their respective authors, and none of them are guilty of plagiarizing each other or any similar works that have come before them. Copyright law considers them original, unique works despite having similar themes and/or conflicts.

So is someone who says "no one ever creates anything new" correct? Technically, on a very broad and generic scale, I suppose it is true. But that's not how creativity is viewed in modern society, including by the laws used to define intellectual property. Maybe the person who proudly proclaims no new creations can ever be created will win at the game of Pointless Semantics, but most people - including and especially professional writers - live in a world where originality is a legal concern, not a semantic one.

And with that distinction made, if someone still wants to tell me that the idea for my next piece of creative writing is basically a re-imagining of Faust in an updated setting, or that my song is basically just " Canon in D

For a great illustration of this reference, please spend five minutes of your life watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

" in a slightly different chord or register, I would kindly remind you that (as long as it's not outright intellectual property theft), the powers that be in the world of intellectual property disagree with you. And as long as they see it as original and as long as the people paying me to write it see it as original, that's good enough for me.