I think it's only as you start becoming really serious about being creative that you suddenly fear being unoriginal. As a young teenager I wrote fanfiction and ripped off other people's ideas with zero shame or compunction, I loved playing in other people's worlds and reworking their ideas. But during my earlier twenties, when I decided seriously that I wanted to write novels and stories, I suddenly developed this massive complex around originality. It became the most important thing that my work seemed completely organic, and like nothing that had ever come before it. I discarded whole ideas and passages of written text because it felt derivative of something I loved. At one point I tried to write fantasy, but gave up because I had just read Game of Thrones and I seemed unable to write anything that didn't feel plucked straight from the pages of that series.
This feeling can be really paralysing and difficult to deal with, and even now when I find I have trouble getting words on the page or pencil to paper, it can be because these old ghosts are starting to hover again.
Fortunately, like most people, as I've gotten older I've learned that most of my insecurities, this one included, are blown completely out of proportion and that often they are just an excuse to not get things done.
Originality in art, is not a priority, in fact, it is non-existent. All art ,whether it be a novel, a painting or a piece of music, is part of a larger ongoing conversation in which all artists across these mediums are inspired and influenced by one another. If you have any creative passion you do yourself a disservice by thinking about your art as separate from anything else that has come before it. Art takes on a far greater and more powerful meaning when you ditch this desperation to be 'original' and instead enjoy the fact that your work contributes to a huge cultural tapestry.
Virginia Woolf's writing and it's place in modernism is indeed a nod to her being part of a new and fresh movement, BUT she was inspired by Russian writer Dostoevsky who, in turn, was influenced by the novels of Dickens. All great writers are inspired by those who came before, and much of their work involves direct references to older literature. Fun fact: During Shakespeare's time, penning your own original ideas was not considered a valid form of literature, almost everything written at that time involves taking a concept from Biblical lore, Greco-Roman mythology or European history and reworking it. King Lear is a reworking of an old English tale written 500 years before Shakespeare turned it into a play. Even George R R Martin, who rails against fanfiction and 'stealing original ideas' doesn't seem to realise that A Song of Ice and Fire is just AU fantasy Wars of the Roses Fanfiction. So the idea that art's value lies in it's originality is completely false, and if you think that the only way to create something worth celebrating is to create something nobody's ever seen before, you're never going to create a damn thing.
Advice and inspiration for living a creative lifestyle and staying inspired and productive is something I will be doing a lot of on this blog, as I have a lot of creative goals and aspirations for myself and the advice will be just as helpful for me as it will be for anyone else reading it!
So for anyone struggling with feeling unoriginal I would say this: Let go of the idea that being 'original' will give your creations some kind of extra value, let go of the idea that if you hold on long enough, original thought will just spring from you, untouched and pure. Instead embrace your muses and inspirations. Greedily consume the content that you love and aspire to be like, and trust that your own voice will be a beautiful mosaic of all these different inspirations and that, in taking them and building on things that are already out there, you are taking part in the universal artistic conversation that has been going on since we first touched charcoal to the side of a cave wall.
Of course this doesn't mean writing a book called 'Shmarry Shmotter and the Thinker's Pebble' and pretending it was all your idea, but if your book involves teachers of magic, or a small unlikely eleven year old hero, or an unexpected villain go for it! If you work hard on your art, making the revisions and redrafts that all art forms need, ultimately your own unique take will come through whatever you're making anyway. You just need to have confidence in your ability to create something that deserves to exist.
Thank you very much for reading and stick around for more posts about creativity and creation.
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