No Ideas original?

[mghan44]

I got in an argument with a friend who says that there are no new ideas, only new ways to do things.

He said in literature every story has been written they are just told in different ways. I agree that 99.9% of stories have been told in another way, but I think as long as people are alive there will always be 100% original ideas.

Can anyone give me an example of stories that they feel are totally and 100% original and nothing like anything else in this sense?

[Princess_1986]

Tarantula by Bob Dylan :P

But seriously, I don't think anything can be 100% original. Surely everything was inspired by something else. When we write, we subconsciously apply all of the knowledge we have of poetry - whether we intend to or not. The same with prose. But it's a great discussion point.

[Old Crow]

Well it's true that there is nothing that simply spawns itself out of pure ingenuity. Everything, including any work of literature, has a starting point. I think the idea that there is no originality anymore stems more from a misconception of originality itself. There is no completely original work of art. Never was. Never will be. But there are works of art that have original features, and sometimes their originality is difficult to see, at first, simply because their uniqueness makes them difficult to understand or latch onto, which is why so many cannonical books spend years or more in obscurity following their publication. The second people like your friend start to think that we've simply run out of ideas, (as if there was only a limited amount available from the beggining and we've just reached the end of the list) it means something new is already beggining, and they just can't see it yet.

[metal134]

Yeah, I've heard the "evertythings been done" argument a million times, and I don't buy it. Sure, you see many stories that bear similarties to works already created, but it's like princess said, everything was inspired by something, so in that sense, nothing was every original and everything had aleady been done before anything at all was done.

[JCamilo]

It is not everything have been done. The main factor of creation is Influence, so you can alwas track down influences in every work (to a point when we are going to start to say : This work originated from oral tradition). But they are new (I love Borges idea of limited possibilities combined over and over in different ways).
So, Dante's Divine Comedy was something totally new. But we can track Ovid and Virgil (this one too obvious) influences there.

[Niamh]

I think it is in concept of literature written in the last few hundred years.

How about the Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy? Thats quite original.

[barbara0207]

If you look at literature in a very general way, then there cannot be much originality. Literature is about human beings - and people will be people. We love, we hate, we hope, we're disappointed, we're happy, we're sad. Human behaviour hasn't changed that much over the centuries - generally speaking. But the more you get into detail the more originality there can be. Views have changed, moral values (to a certain extent), the sciences etc. All these little or big changes can be seen in literature.

Let me give you an example. Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" is - partly - set in WW II. The generalist may say, "War! Poeple have been writing about war for two thousand years! That's not original!" But this novel is set in this special war, which was certainly in some ways different from all the other wars before it. The more you go into detail in "Slaughterhouse 5" the more you will find parts that could not have been written 1000 years ago.

So I think the complaint that there is nothing original in literature any more can only be made by people who don't have a too close look at books.

[JBI]

It's a philosophical question. According to philosophers, like Rousseau, the mind is born blank, and everything else is obtained once you enter society, once you feel the influences of the already established. By that logic, each writer is borrowing from the writer before him, tracing back to oral tradition, which hypothetically could be traced back to natural phenomenon, and real experience. Therefore, according to this argument, nothing is original since everything is based upon influences.

Aspects, of course, can be original. Like the made up language used by Joyce in Finnegans Wake, yet the concepts employed are not entirely original, and the plot most certainly is not. The whole concept was taken as Joyce admits in the opening line of the book, from Vico.

a 100% original idea in my opinion is completely impossible, since people don't just get thoughts, something sparks every event.

[Etienne]

There is always new ideas, the difficulty is finding them or being able to use some ideas that don't seem like good ideas in a nice way. Mediocre people have at all time claimed that there was no new ideas simple because they couldn't think of anything new.

[crazefest456]

I think new ideas are developed from an older, more general question...it doesn't necessarily have to be directly related to the original idea. I feel that we are taught concepts, like love, knowledge, self-preservation through intuitiveness. We seem to be born with the most base concepts, and depending on the society or culture we are born into, we then develop new ideas that seem 'unique' to us.

[Aiculík]

I also think that there are no new stories. Of course, people and their civilization develop, there are new discoveries, new wars... In that sense, we can say that a story about the new war is also new.

But if we go to the core - the world changes, but do people change as well? Are human desires, worries, fears different from those in past, e.g. in Homer's time? Or is there some definite answer to eternal questions people ask themselves - who are they, where do they come from, why are they here, what is the sense and purpose of their life? I at least am not aware of it. We still have same goals as people thousands years ago: to love and be loved, to be healthy and safe, to live happy and comfortable life. We try to move forvard, to live better than our ancestors, to ensure better life for our children. To give our life a sense, and order. But we are not perfect and our world is not perfect, either. So there are many obstructions we must overcome, many problems we must solve, many things and people that endanger our dreams and that we must face and fight.

And that is what every story is about, in its core, Hitchhiker Guide to Galaxy same as Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, Oliver Twist or Idiot. Every writer tries to phrase his own view on it - within borders of his own culture, using means he can find in the society where he lives and reacting to things he sees as problematic.

It doesn't really matter if the story is set during Crusade or WWII - well, ok it does, but the most important thing is why the author set the story during the war. Go to the core, and you'll see that questions he asks are very similar, if not the same. Answers may be different, of course, because answers are personal. And that's where setting and cultural environment come in. Things to which author is reacting and things that shaped his view, things that made him the person he is - in short, things that make his story original and worth telling. But take just one step back to look at them from greater distance - and you'd find more general things, common to every story about the war.

[loe]

Maybe Homer can be seen as original, because his works are one of the first.
So the Odysee and Ilias are origin in writing, but not necessarily also origin in thinking.

Greetings