A couple of weeks ago I visited my college: Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. I had not been there in thirty-two years and it was a powerful experience to see the old and the new so close together. There was that immense, ancient and embracing oak tree with its curved branches as low as the top of my head. There was the new library with a terminal at every desk. It was good to see certain things endure and it was good to see new things.
In a creative writing class that I visited while I was there, I was asked a very good question by one of the students: What do you do when you are writing and you feel like what you’ve said has been said before – like maybe you read it someplace but you’re not quite sure.” The student then went on to add: “This happens particularly with metaphors.” The problem with people asking me questions at conferences is that the articulate answer that I should give comes to me on the plane ride home or even later. But maybe, as inarticulate as it was, what came out spontaneously and “from the gut” in my answer to that student is probably still the best answer I can give. I told him that he had to push through and keep on writing. He shouldn’t worry about whether it has been said before because it most certainly has. The plots, the type of characters, the style of your writing, it has all been done before. The fact that you are repeating should not stop you because 1) hopefully what you are writing about is something that is worth repeating, a story or an image or a character that brings a little more light into this world; and 2) if you are writing from a deep center in yourself, if you are writing about things that really concern you or move you or have affected you, you are going to be saying something new. The fact that you are different and special from everyone else in this world is where originality comes from. I’m not saying that your writing needs to be autobiographical somehow. What I’m saying is that even if you are, say, writing a teenage vampire story, there should be something in that story that comes from deep inside of you. If you never reach that deep place. If all that worries you as you write the story is getting it published or being read by lots of young people, then I’m afraid that you are not being original. You indeed are repeating what you have read before.
So to the student who asked me the about the feeling of not being original, I say push through with your writing but also dig deep. Find a inside of you a question you can’t answer or a mystery that baffles you, or a place of pain or joy and take it from there. If the metaphor that you wrote is not something that touches you, find another way of saying it. Above all, believe with all your heart that you are special and original, because you are.
