End of originality?

I enjoy listening to the podcast Do I Dare to Eat a Peach with Dan and Rob Wells every Wednesday. Both have participated in podcasting before, they are both published authors of international renown, and they are brothers (Dan is older by less then two years). And like most siblings they enjoy similar things, but often disagree about them. I enjoy the banter and the information (they are both very intelligent and Rob is a total research nut) but I don't always agree with what they say. For instances in episode 21 they talk about the oddness of the poem that was originally written with Camille Saint-Saens "Dance Macabre" (the 1:09:35 mark in the episode) I was screaming, "It was written in French! Of course it's odd, it's a translation!" Anyway, I've been known to disagree with them, but I still enjoy myself.

 Episode 36 was on covers of songs and it got me musing. Why do we enjoy new versions of something? Covers of songs. Remakes of movies. Re-tellings of stories in novels. Let's take the story of Cinderella. That link will take you the the "adaptations" part of the Wikipedia article. As you look at the list, keep in mind that novels and short stories are not listed. My family has at least two re-tellings in novel form. How many times has that story been retold? I believe I would be accurate to say that it has been done over a hundred times.

In the Do I Dare to Eat a Peach episode, Dan and Rob specifically only look at covers of the songs, not mash-ups (mixing two or more songs), or adaptations and remixes (altering the lyrics). My comparison to Cinderella does include those additional elements. But regardless it begs the question: Why use the same old tired story again. And again. And again.

Dan's other podcast, Writing Excuses covered this question in Season 8, episode 6. Taken from the liner notes they address my question: "Familiar stories let us explore things in new ways, both because we know what’s coming, and because we don’t need to be brought up to speed on the story." They are applying this to written stories, but the same can be said of other media. Rob Wells mentions in an earlier Peach episode that movie adaptations of books are like making apple pie. It takes a whole food (apples), but turns it into  a different food (pie). This provides variation and can produce different perspectives.

For example, JRR Tolkin talks about the sacrifice of Boromir  in The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring. It takes about a two paragraphs (online text here p. 417). It is a stirring scene and you do feel a sense of loss at his death. This scene was taken by Peter Jackson in his movie adaptation and translated to a visual medium. The end product is very different from the original, but the power behind it is equal or arguably greater. NOTE - I am not advocating that movies are better than books, just that they are different and different is not inherently good or bad.

Now let's look at the title of this blog. Is our fascination with established stories ruining our creativity and preventing people from being original? Some may say that it is. I enjoy a variety of YouTube artists and many of them do covers, adaptations, remixes, and mash-ups of popular songs. The last two movies I watched were a Bond film (a book adaptation) and Wreck-it-Ralph a movie pulling from video game troupes. Even Pixar's two upcoming movies are pulling from works they've already established (Planes from the Cars world, and a Monsters Inc. College film). Where is the new stuff?! Well, believe it or not, it's in there. Let me explain.

I recently finished reading Cinder by Marissa Meyer. It is one of the many adaptations of Cinderella and one of the two that my family owns. Allow me to explain how it is original. First, it is a science fiction story that takes place so far in the future that people living on the moon have evolved to be more than human. Cinder, our lowly protagonist, is a cyborg. Oh, and did I mention it takes place in the Orient, or that there is a plague killing everybody, or that Cinder is a mechanic? Like Mary Robinette says in the Writing Excuses episode cited earlier, the story has the important elements that tell us it is a Cinderella story, but everything else is new a exciting. I highly recommend the book. So you know the series isn't done yet, but it's well worth reading.

Allow me one math example here. If you were to look at most advanced math concepts you would discover that, for the most part, they are extrapolations and adaptations of the four basic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Heck, even multiplication could be seen as an advanced form of addition. And subtraction is just the opposite. So have there been any original science or maths done since the discovery of addition? Of course. Original thinking in math and science (including the social sciences) is often taking established ideas and applying them in new ways, or combining them to create something new. This is the basic idea of synthesis.

The argument could be used that humanity has been creating ideas for long enough that there is no such thing as an original idea - in any discipline. Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces basically says that despite existing thousands of miles apart all the different cultures in the world had, in essence  the same myths and legends. So was humanity ever really original? Yes. Our originality comes from taking the known and mixing it with the unknown. Taking the familiar and crossing it with the strange. Taking two seemingly opposite ideas and combining them and finding not only do they not cancel each other out, but blend in a new and exciting way. Think about the scene from Disney/Pixar's Ratatouille - where Remy tries to explain food to his brother. It's kind of like that. 

For your viewing (and listening pleasure) here is a playlist I put together of some of my current favorite covers from YouTube artists.

Muse on what your next original idea will be while listening to the music.