If at first you don't succeed, try again

you go on | a comic

“The music fits quite nicely for this little guy”

“Whom is it for? It is for them.”

“Who is coming to the party? She is coming to the party.”

But the problem with that is twofold: 1) language, especially spoken language, evolves, and 2) instinctive grammar doesn’t always cover written language, since we don’t write the same way we talk. 

It’s why we end up with things like “should of” (when it should be “should have”), or people saying “For all intensive purposes” (instead of “for all intents and purposes”) or trying to put an ‘a’ in “definitely.” Grammar (and spelling) isn’t necessarily intuitive, especially in the bonkers language that is English, but there are some rules that can be taught and understood and generally trusted to be true most of the time. They just…aren’t taught anymore? And that baffles me too. 

This problem comes from overthinking. Kind of. The thing about the word “original” that bugs me is that people think it means “never seen before”, but that’s not how it should be perceived by an artist or a writer. Original should mean “seen again in a different way” because honestly, there are no new ideas; there are only twisted ones. Creativity isn’t using things from other art, it’s changing them. If you want to write a science fiction story that takes place on a spaceship in the far depths of the galaxy, go right ahead, but the aspects you mirror from other fiction should be tweaked to be your own, rather than a reflection of another author’s interpretation of these devices. 

For instance, I’m writing a superhero story that has a lot of similarities to the Marvel comics, but there’s a lot of things I’ve changed or elaborated more on than the comic series did when it comes to what a world with superheroes would look like. I focus on different what ifs and different struggles of characters in these circumstances, and though it’s easy to see where my inspiration came from, it’s clearly a very different story that I would classify as original.

Original is an often misunderstood word in art, but hopefully this explanation will contribute toward a less constricting mindset, and give you new ideas toward your own work.

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