An Unpopular Opinion #5: Strive for Novelty, Not Originality · 11:02am Mar 19th, 2016
Strive for Novelty, Not Originality.
Maybe incest, too, because why not?
To start this off, I'm going to need to put forward some definitions as I see them.
An original story is one which charts uncharted waters. Many of its elements are far out there, extremely unique, and have never before been done. Despite what some say there are still original stories out there. Some of them are great. However,
"Different isn't always better, but better is always different." - Scotty Meltzer (Juggler, Entertainer)
Originality doesn't always work out or make for a good story. An idea can be both original and bad. Often times things which are highly original are either niche or ahead of their time--which some may view as a good thing and others as a bad thing. Other equally often times it makes for something that's esoteric. I'm sure all of you at some point have sat through some highly original piece of art, film, book, game and wanted to gouge your eyes out from the senselessness of it all.
"Is it a commentary on the potential of a blank canvas? An expression of the emptiness inside of us? A critique on the coloring of the wall?" Daniel asks.
Who the hell knows, Daniel. Who the hell knows. Possibly the artist. Maybe.
Again, originality isn't inherently bad. But it can be bad. A lot.
So, Novelty. Let's dig into this word which many view as a whore of cheap tricks and see what it has to offer.
"Winners don't do different things, they do things differently." - Shiv Khera (Motivational Writer, Politician)
Novelty in a story means it offers something new and exciting: something new to be explored. The feeling is also often fleeting, which is where it gets its bad name from. "The novelty will wear off" is probably what's said most about the word.
However, that doesn't mean you can't have something else there when the novelty wears off. As fans of My Little Pony, you're probably quite familiar with novelty. But it's season 6 and people have stuck around, why? The reason is because it had more to offer than novelty. Novelty offers a hook, an excitement, a desire to explore a new space. As that feeling wears off, you can carry on with something else. There are few things which gets a reader more absorbed and more hooked into your story than something about it that is new and exciting.
Westeros, from the Song of Ice and Fire books, is a fascinating world. I think Game of Thrones is a perfect example of something which is not original, but new and exciting.
In my current story, A Darkened Land, I created a world very thematically reminiscent of the Dark Souls games, but as a warped version of Equestria which frequently breaks away from both source materials. The goal was to create a world which was new and exciting that readers would want to discover more and more about. The more a viewer explores the new space, the more the novelty wears off. That's why many people felt a lot more magic back during earlier seasons of My Little Pony: things hadn't been as thoroughly explored and so there was more wonderment at what hadn't.
So just as a side note: you usually don't want to over-explore the novelty of a story. The exploration of what is new and exciting in your story should try to be bled and stretched across the entire story--at least, that's my opinion. Of course, reveal too slowly and the viewer could get fed up or impatient.
As novelty wears off, it's a good idea to have something solid and familiar: great characters which the reader wants to read about and a gripping plot.
Novelty in fanfic could come from a new ship. I am full of desire for a handful of specific, rare ships to be written well. At this point I'd probably read any fic that ships RarityxLightning Dust, and I've been heavily considering writing a fic which ships Twilight x Fleur De Lis in a magical-canterlot-highschool type setting. Vinyl Scratch x Rainbow Dash. Spitfire x Celestia. I'm just spitballing at this point.
Ahem. It could also come from a perversion of the original world or the original plot. "What if Twilight hadn't been sent to Ponyville and instead got embroiled in Canterlot politics?" "It's the far near not-so-distant future present and ponies have bionic limbs." etc. You could explore characters and friendships which aren't as commonly done. Or take a common one and show it during a different time of those characters' lives. (Vinyl and Octavia in University Days, for example.)
Point being that few things now are original and many original ideas fall flat on their face. Western fantasy didn't start with Tolkien and CS Lewis, they took those that tried before them and did it differently, popularizing it.
So it's my opinion that striving for originality is a bit of a crapshoot, and that it's better to take mostly existing things and execute upon them differently in an effort to create something new and exciting. "Good artists copy; great artists steal."
Thoughts? Questions? Favorite pizza toppings?
Feta cheese, tomatoes, onions, artichoke hearts. Yum. Only veggie pizza I will ever pick over meat pizzas. Super tangy.
Man, for a blog centered around originality and novelty, you chose two oddly identical quotes to put so close together.
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Well, as a wise not-man once said,
"Don't try to be different. Just go through life doing things differently." - Cyborg Hitler
Every time I hear the word "originality" as applied to writing, I remember Nina Paley's essay on the subject.
Due to agreeing with her, I believe novelty isn't quite it either. :)
I think you're about spot on. I mean, most people can tell you Harry Potter, LotR, Star Wars, and Eragon have the same basic plot but they are all excited extremely differently.
For curiosity's sake, what current movies, books, etc. do you think execute the "Novelty" thing well? Take something well known, but twist it just a little to make it new and exciting.
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- Game of Thrones for one, as mentioned above.
- I think Overwatch has taken the combat of TF2, mixed in some moba and quake, and created one of the most varied set of classes in any class-based first person shooter. I've been playing it for some time now and it explores a pretty new/different kind of arena and object oriented combat.
- The Martian took the man vs. nature survival story and did something pretty wild with it. In most space survival stories it's the technology which breaks down, but most of the difficulties encountered by Watney are caused by the environment of mars.
- Avatar took dances with wolves/pocahontas/ferngully out into the sci-fi realm and created a world people fell in love with. Despite what's said about the plot or characters, the movie made an extremely memorable world, and the novelty of it carried the film. (It suffered from not having much beneath that novelty, too, as mentioned above.)
- John Wick was in many ways a well-executed stock action movie revenge story. However, the underground mob and hitman world it built made the movie far more compelling and interesting than it would have otherwise been. The coins used to pay for special services, a hotel "neutral zone", and similar elements added a lot to how the movie kept you gripped and moving along.
I think I understand the distinction you're trying to make. It makes novelty sound like a cheap trick, which it more or less is. My mind runs first to gimmicks of novelty:
- poetry that makes metaphors that don't work ("as blue as the sun")
- Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa with moustache
moma.org/wp/moma_learning/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Duchamp.-In-advance-of-a-Broken-Arm-295x395.jpg
- Marcel Duchamp's "Prelude to a Broken Arm" (that's a snow shovel hanging from the ceiling)
michaelpimblett.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/duchamp_fountain_1917.jpg
- Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"
- Cormac McCarthy's punctuation
- [insert Marvel character here] in Equestria
I wonder whether this is a qualitative distinction, or if "novelty" just means things that look original to stupid people.
If I do understand you, though, then I have no interest in novelty.
The picture is obviously of an art gallery for people wearing Google glasses.
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The distinction I was trying to make is that something can have novelty but that doesn't make it always a gimmick nor just things that look "original to stupid people". It also doesn't make it shallow. The novel 1984 would fall under my view of novelty. "Big brother", "ministry of love", 1984 wasn't original in that a fair number of stories about a facist future existed before it. Brave New World came more than a decade before 1984, and was more accurate in its predictions than 1984, but the absurdity of 1984 is a novelty which made it the much more popular of the two. Double-think, the war on eurasia, the world of 1984 had a certain novelty to it that made it new and exciting.
What's more, it wasn't original, it was transformative of what had come before it. I think that's the distinction I wanted to make. Originality to me is about uncharted waters whereas novelty is often about "X with a twist!" A quality which can be sleazy, or it can generate things such as Lord of the Rings, 1984, or honestly most of English literature. You can trace many books back to less popular precursors.
Of course "original vs. novel" isn't a binary relationship and stories can have both, neither, or some mix of the two.
Some of the examples you posted are novelties with substance behind them, others are fleeting.
3818039 Okay, I think I see what you mean. You count some things as "original" that I'd count as gimmicks, like, say, wrapping an island in pink plastic and calling it art (which some guy did). But my division into "original" vs "gimmick" seems to include a judgement of value, which is improper. Such judgement should come only after an enumeration of properties. Your distinction is more objective. Though then I wonder why use "original" instead of "experimental".
I'd at least agree that "experimental" has been mis-valued for a century or more. Its value is in learning how to make better literature, but even a successful experiment is not itself necessarily great literature.