Are You Original Enough?
The secret ingredient you may be missing in your writing
With producing work taking up my summer this will be the last Monday column until September, when we’ll also launch a Medium Cool revamp.
This spring I started a novel days after finishing a different novel. I know! I thought it was a strong concept, got a few chapters in, right around the deciding mark—which for me is fifty pages. Then I realized, “Wait, I feel like I’m watching a two-star movie on a flight. How am I not interested in my own story?”
There was nothing technically wrong with it, but there was a cardboard cutout feeling to my avatar who I had no connection with; she just felt, well… dull. In other words, I let myself get carried by the idea, and the idea wasn’t original enough.
If you let this kind of malaise stand it could affect the overall health of the work. At the risk of sounding cynical, every editor or producer has seen ten different versions, this month, of whatever you’re working on. Be that a novel, short story, or spec script. Thinking positively though, editors and producers are also waiting for the writers doing that one thing differently. How do you know that you’re the original one? The good thing is that you’re going to be the first person to know.
But where does originality in writing live? Is it in plot and complications? A little bit. If you take an improv class, they will teach you to find your second and third idea faster, and avoid settling on your first, and probably expected idea. That is the same process as a first draft for writers and, like performers, you can train yourself to cycle faster through it.
While invention is important, I really believe intention is maybe more important for long-form writing. The more of you that you put into your work the more it will be original.
If we look at three quotes from people who don’t write novels you can see what unites them across their disciplines.
“Put your feelings in there. Don’t paint some shit like you don’t care.” —Joan Mitchell, painter
“There is no recipe. It’s a guessing game. But what we have to do is guess correctly.” —Marco Pierre White, chef
“Any composer for musical theater can write a bad song, but writing a ‘wrong song,’ one without purpose or meaning, is a far greater sin.” —Stephen Sondheim, composer
Originality, for all of them, comes out of a sense of purpose. Something personal and singular to you that connects you to this work. And that means you’re the only one who will bring it over the finish line.
This you-factor is the most unreplicable thing in the world. Don’t be afraid of the quirky parts of you, the stories from your life which can be spun in. If you’re facing down a manuscript that’s coming off as boring, I suggest you try putting in what’s missing: you.