What's Never Been Done Before
Thoughts on originality in what turned out to be a thinly-veiled Akira the Don fanpost.
“…catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what has never been seen, to draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance, and act what has never before been done.”
Terence McKenna, 1984
McKenna spoke in the manner of a man recently returned from somewhere instructive1 and eager to describe the view; the line above is from a 1984 lecture, in that characteristic register of articulate hopefulness. Akira the Don, decades later, set it to music as Catalysts. For more McKenna, the whole of ATD’s Timewave album is McKenna over lo-fi beats2, a musical hour well spent. Most anything Akira makes deserves a listen.
I digress.
McKenna is right.
He’s right, and the inverse of what he said is also right, and the inverse is the harder thing to say. At least and perhaps especially to to a creative. It’s that you can’t, with any sincerity of effort, keep yourself from making something that’s never been made before. It’s a strange doctrine. Which leaves me wondering why so many writers find it occasion for panic.
❤️🔥 The Romantasy Paradox
A confession, briefly: I have never read a romantasy novel (I write in a different and less commercially robust corner of the shelf). But the genre is, at present, hard to overlook. Its readership has grown at a rate publishers seldom see in a generation, and any writer paying attention has reason to consider why.
The lesson, I should add, is general. It’s useful to anyone working inside a genre… which is to say nearly everyone.
The contract those writers undertake with their readers is announced, fairly explicitly, in the tropes the genre repeats: fated mates and bond magic, bonded mounts and slow-burn enmities turning to romance, courtly intrigue and morally compromised love interests. The list could go on. Its character is the point. The readership wants the same book again, shaped like the previous book, and registers its disappointment in DNFs and one-star reviews when the shape is broken. And yet the genre is producing new voices at a rate the rest of fiction would be glad to claim.
How is it that a genre run on tropes is also the loudest place in publishing for new things to happen?3
📜 Genre Is a Contract
A trope, properly understood, isn’t a constraint on the writer but a promise to the reader. It’s the handshake by which the genre is entered, the thing the reader came for, the assurance that the hours about to be spent in your company will repay them with a particular pleasure they’ve learned to trust the genre to deliver.
The surest way to break that faith is with misplaced creativity. The writer becomes convinced the genre needs “transcending,” and that the reader will be grateful for the effort. He’ll call it cleverness, and possibly courage. The reader, having entered the contract in good faith, finds it broken; the rating, in due course, reflects the trespass.
What the reader signed up for is, more than anything, a kind of vacation: the beach, the theme park, the cruise, the campsite, the ski lodge, the foreign country. Each comes with its own set of expectations, and the satisfaction of the trip depends almost entirely on whether those expectations are met.
Within the type, the details can vary endlessly. One beach week isn’t another. But the type itself is the promise; the reader who booked a cruise does not want to wake up at a ski resort. Your job is to deliver the vacation they booked.
To a creative working in the genre, certain tropes begin to feel over-trodden. Enemies to lovers, forced proximity, fated mates: written too many times, in need of fresh air. And to you, the writer, this may very well be true. So don’t write that one. But your fatigue is yours, not the reader’s. Don’t close someone else’s favorite beach for everyone simply because you’ve grown tired of the sand.
Sometimes a reader wants something unlike anything they’ve ever read before. More often, what they want is simpler: their favorite genre, filled with their favorite tropes, made new. A mindless return to the same beach, because the beach is what they like.
I can speak more readily to sword-and-sorcery, and to sci-fi as well. I’m under no illusion that my ideas are wholly unique. A morally gray rogue, a numinous artifact, a body count, a city as foreign as another world. It’s all been done before. Many times. Because people like it. Sci-fi runs the same way, with its own well-trodden cast: the wanderer on a hostile planet, the AI on the brink, the corporation that has outlasted nations.
The destination is theirs; the itinerary is yours.
🗝️ Steal Forward
If originality isn’t, after all, the goal, what then is the discipline?
Austin Kleon’s word for it is theft.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination… Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.”
Jim Jarmusch
Kleon’s reframe is more practical than provocative. The artist who claims pure invention is, more often than not, either misleading or under-read. The artist who admits influence acquires the freedom to choose his lineage, to elect which dead minds he’s in conversation with, and which living ones he’s brave enough to riff against.
“It’s not where you take things from. It’s where you take them to.”
Jean-Luc Godard
Consider, then, what stealing well looks like in the writing room.
You read fifty books in your chosen genre. You catalog what works.
Some beats inspire. Others go flat. This is information about you much moreso than anyone from whom you intend to steal.
Then you begin. You imitate the beats that thrilled you. You intend, with all sincerity, a faithful reproduction.
But you can’t do it.
Your sentences arrive at the wrong angle. Your protagonist reflects a heart the originals didn’t have. Your villain has a tic your influences would never have allowed.
That accidental drift is the originality. The noise in the copy. The limitations and imperfections. The pops and scratches that speak to us in so-called the “lo-fi” beats that have been popular for the better part of a decade, now.
This is McKenna’s observation, but inverted: you don’t strain to do what’s never been done. Because in fact, you can’t keep yourself from doing it.
🎧 The Akira Test
Which brings us back to the man whose song opened this essay.
Akira the Don’s whole vocation is, fairly openly, borrowing. He takes the words of others: David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon College commencement speech, Marcus Aurelius’s meditations, Jordan Peterson’s lectures, and dozens more. He arranges them, cleverly timing pauses and repeating lines, over his own beats.
The borrowing is the premise.
And yet every Meaningwave track is unmistakably his. The sound palette, the energy, the layering, the way the spoken word is arranged to maximize impact and remain faithful enough to the message to be recognizable. That signature is on every track regardless of whose voice carries the verse.
The lesson, plainly stated: He’s a particularly strong dose of the anxiety this essay concerns. He took someone else’s actual words. If anyone should produce a derivative work, it’s him.
Yet he produces the opposite.
If a man whose body of work is built on other people’s words can’t help but make something new, uncharted, and original which only he could have made, then the rest of us, staring at a blank page with no one’s words borrowed but our own, are left with no excuse.
🏖️ The Same Beach Twice
A reasonable reader may suspect, at this point, that the recommendation is to write the same book as everyone else and trust that your fingerprints will appear on their own.
That’s not the recommendation.
The idea of involuntary originality isn’t a license to phone in the work. Instead, it’s permission to stop solving the wrong problem.
McKenna told us, in 1984, that we’re catalysts to say what’s never been said.
He’s right.
What he left out, and what was, perhaps, the harder thing to say, is that the trying isn’t necessary. You could imitate, in good faith, for a decade, and come out sounding nothing like the person you set out to imitate. It’s impossible to go on the same vacation twice, best intentions be damned. Different weather. Different company. A different version of you on the beach.
That’s what’s never been done before. Not the destination, but the trip.
Honor the genre; deliver the vacation; the rest (McKenna had it right) is what you can’t help but do.
🔌 Shameless Plug
Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness is available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback. Its sequel, Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter, is also now available as an eBook and in paperback.
Valen the Rogue and the Arcane Awakening will be released soon.
Say “no” to drugs.
“Over lo-fi beats” really undersells what Meaningwave delivers, but what can I do?
I’ve been told by self-published writers more attuned to market trends than I am, that you ignore romantasy at your commercial peril. I commend the observation to writers more market-minded than myself. Just enough money to buy a few lattes and make my taxes more complicated for me, thanks.