Originality

I'm going to talk about originality. It’s going to be tough- There is much hammering and power drilling and circular sawing right outside my window, which is forcing me to put music on, which plays hell with my concentration.

I think it’s fair to say that a person knows whether they are being original- let’s say in the process of creating something. When you set out to make something, I think it’s important to try to offer something that you perceive as new and interesting- I mean, one way to look at it is that people aren’t really going to pay too much attention to what you have to say (in the language of whatever medium with which you choose to express yourself) unless it’s interesting. There are lots of reasons that something might be interesting to someone, like for example it reminds them of something important they haven’t thought of for a long time or it’s just aesthetically pleasing to them, but I think a big one is that it needs to offer something new, some element of new. Either way it has to offer something worth thinking about.

SO what you are trying to do when you create something original is to catch and keep someone’s attention and ultimately have an impact on their life, which isn’t going to happen if the whole of what you’ve created doesn’t coalesce above the mean of filtered stimuli. What I mean by that is I think our brains get so much information all day long from everything we perceive that it naturally tries to process it all into either things it needs to figure out (meaning discover what its significance, relevance, and repercussions to it might be), or stuff that’s banal and can be glossed over because it’s significance etc. is already understood, and thus can be seen not as information in an of itself but more as a direct path or line leading to a predictable outcome. I see it as the same thing as learning a new instrument, for example. At first, all the notes you want on a piano are difficult to find because the sensations of touching the keys are new, of the way it feels to sit on the bench, of the way your muscles have to move and even the way the neurons in your brain have to fire to move those muscles in order to move from one note to the next, it’s all new. As you continue to practice those initial sensations get filtered out by your brain and you are free to coast right through them to the next new bit that takes your immediate attention, and you are getting better. You are LEARNDING. The more you practice the farther forward you can see- it’s like wearing a path through the weeds. You walk back and forth and back and forth, farther and farther, enhancing your awareness of what you want, which is on the other end of the path, until you can simply zone out and experience the bliss of communicating directly through music because everything in between is automatic. I think writing works this way, and so do all other forms of creativity.

I think that the focus on the immediate moment that comes from needing to pay attention to those first initial sensations always comes with learning new things. I think that living in the immediate moment stretches out time because it creates useful memories. I think most people feel like time passes by like a breeze because they don’t fill their lives up with enough interesting new things, and when they look back on their lives as older people they idealize their youth because things felt new then, and then they fell into a routine that their brain has just filtered out since then. It makes them feel desperate and dead. They crave these new things without knowing why. This is why people like stories and why people join the army. Our lives work the same way as learning the piano.

On the other hand another way to look at the question of originality is whether what is being done is a pastiche of something that has already had an impact or it has simply copied something interesting yet obscure in the hopes that the source will not be found out and associated, in which case it’s just a matter of the size of the audience. This point isn’t as fun to explore because so much of our impact in life depends on the quantity of the audience, which is sad because, like I read once in a Vonnegut essay, there are so many people in the world that are always going to be better than you at what you do, and because of the increased communication that results in modern technology, you are competing with all of them rather than finding a comfortable niche in your own beloved community.

One last thing I wanted to say about originality, is that everything may have already been done that way before in a given medium, but that doesn’t mean the medium can’t be reinvented or combined in new ways with other mediums.

Ta.