Everyone has a story they want to tell. For most, it’ll percolate in the back of their minds for most of their lives, drip-drip-dripping on long flights, empty commutes, and while doing the dishes. It rarely moves past the idle daydream stage, its existence reserved for downtime conversations of, “When I retire, maybe I’ll write a book.” A very lucky few manage to sit down and turn that fermented tale into words on a page. Even fewer manage to make it to the end. A fully realized, finished first draft is practically a thing of myth and legend to most folks, so it’s no wonder the writer takes pride in their effort. But, well, pride before the fall and all that. See, after all that time and effort, someone else has to read it. 

There are a lot of critiques writers can take in stride, especially if they’ve been through the editing process before. Structure, style, voice; these are all fixes the writer expects to have to make. Grammar? Pah. That’s what editors are for. Yet there’s one critique that can kill a project where it stands, one that, as well-meaning as it is, can rock the very foundation of the writer’s confidence:

“Oh, this reminds me of That One Book.”

The writer might not believe it at first. After all, they hadn’t even read that book, or, if they had, it’d been years. But words don’t lie. As they reflect and reread their writing they start seeing the similarities. Yep, this character is just like that one. Oh, and this plot line follows this other popular book almost exactly. This dangerous train of thought ends up with the writer picking apart their work and seeing every influence, every reference they might have made. Their conclusion? None of it is original. The story has been told before. The rough draft enters a desk drawer and never sees the light of day again. 

Dramatic? Yes. Real? Also yes. There isn’t a single writer I’ve met who hasn’t dealt with imposter syndrome over the originality of their ideas. Heck, it happened to me about two years ago when I won a short story contest with a barely-cleaned-up rough draft. I was so excited that I’d won, I shared it with friends and family. My dad, who has always supported my writing, told me it reminded him of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I’d never read the book, but I loved the Bladerunner movies, so I could acknowledge that I’d been influenced by them. Then I started thinking about the origin of the story idea; it had been a joint creation with a dear friend for the sole purpose of writing fanfiction (Yes, I write fanfiction. No, you can’t read it). Within two days of winning my first ever short story contest, I was feeling like the J.D. Salinger stand-in featured in the Frasier episode, “A Crane’s Critique”:

The fear of having nothing original to say is a deep one. Every writer falls victim to it at one point or another in their journey. The secret to pulling out of that hole and continuing to plod onward is two-fold. One, you have to recognize that you are not above the influence of the culture you exist in. Two: everything has been written at least once. Nothing you write will ever be a truly original thought. 

Yeah, you heard me. Nothing. Humans have been around for thousands of years and have been telling stories about the messy, stupid ways we interact with each other for just as long. As much as technology, culture, and morals may have changed, it all comes down to the human experience and the shapes we’ve found for telling tales. At a certain point in history, everything that came before became a reference point for everything after. Originality can’t exist with eight billion people alive on this planet and several more billion who came before. 

Take, for instance, the books in the photo banner for this post: Homer’s The Odyssey, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Paolini’s Eragon. The Odyssey is one of the most popular stories in the western world, some scholars even proclaiming it to be so much a part of the cultural fabric that even if you’ve never read or heard the epic poem, you know it. That cultural seepage is how most stories end up being told. The groundbreaking The Lord of the Rings and the YA sensation of the early 2000s, Eragon, are not above its influence. 

Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, even when heavily inspired by folktales, couldn’t quite shake The Odyssey. Frodo’s long journey and his return to an overrun home where he is almost unrecognizable are two mirror-like examples of Odysseus I can pull off the top of my head. Tolkien’s Middle Earth transformed the genre of fantasy as we know it, inspiring many to write stories inspired by Frodo and the Fellowship. Christopher Paolini is one of them, penning his bestseller Eragon at fifteen and having his hero partake in long, arduous journeys and becoming forever changed. Each story inspired the last, the Greek poem echoing its plotlines, characters, and themes into the twenty-first century.

Don’t mistake me, though. The Odyssey isn’t original either. It may be one of the most important pieces of western literature, but it isn’t new. Many scholars have found clear parallels between The Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and that’s before accounting for the stories handed down through oral traditions that have been lost to the ages. Everything, even the classics, are brought into this world through the stories that already exist. 

Yet. When I bring friends around for tea, they will never see these three books on the same shelf. The Odyssey sits on my classics shelf. Tolkien on my Fantasy Greats shelf. Eragon is on the shelf next to other books I loved as a kid. Being influenced or inspired by another work doesn’t prevent a book from being different. Can anyone ever be original? Probably not. But everyone can strive towards something unique. 

The stories told throughout human history can be seen as a giant game of telephone. Someone, perhaps a prehistoric human, tells a story for the next generation. The next generation retells it, changing a few words here and there to mark where they think the emphasis should be. The next generation tells it again, maybe using new words created since their grandfather’s time. This telephone game stretches across continents, across time, across cultures. Each person takes something slightly different from each retelling and passes on this new version to their successor. The stories told today are all but unrecognizable from what they started as, with only hints of the original tale remaining. 

Homer heard of Gilgamesh and combined it with his religion and culture, sending a descendant of Hermes on a long journey. Tolkien heard this and combined it with his love of German folktales, his interest in language, and his trauma from the first World War, creating a new story to share down the line. Paolini heard that story, loved it, and combined it with his youthful optimism, his young escapist fantasy, and shared it with other teens. So the journey of the story continues, as Eragon surely inspired me and many others to write when we were young, motivated by the fact that someone our age, with our interests, had been published.

Even with eight billion of us on this planet, our lives and experiences are uniquely our own. Our individuality is what lets us see stories differently, take new information away, and combine concepts in ways others may not have tried yet. While nothing can ever be truly original, we can strive to be unique, to shed light into dark corners, or hold our favorite stories in the light just so. Don’t stop writing due to a fear of unoriginality. Don’t be the author from Frasier, throwing his manuscript into the void because he unconsciously emulated Dante. Embrace the game of story telephone and let your voice shine through. It’s the only way to keep the game going, and hey, who knows? Maybe the next generation will love your unique version and use it to tell their own.