The Origins of Originality

What constitutes originality today?

In the summer of 2024, I was sweltering in the New York heat while attending the Columbia Publishing Course (CPC). I didn’t expect the heat, having lived in the South all my life and imagined northeastern summers to be a milder affair, but my excitement at being in the New York City tempered all of that. One hot topic in our lectures—and to this day—was A.I. Some speakers were talking about the lawsuits publishing houses were filing against A.I. startups; others about companies licensing their work to those startups preemptively. My most salient memory about A.I. and CPC however, was from a student. They were a writer, like myself, and I remember asking them about their thoughts on A.I. and its potential to replace human writers. They said they had used A.I. themselves, but didn’t really think it had the capability to replace humans in creative writing.

A year later, now sweltering in my familiar Georgia heat, Open A.I.’s CEO Sam Altman posts tweets about ChatGPT being good at creative writing and everyday people use generative A.I. to churn out all sorts of pieces. I read an article dissecting the aforementioned generated short story where the author said, “Is it mind-blowingly original? Hardly. But I wouldn’t hold student or even published work to that standard”. It stuck out to me in part because of the online conversations around originality and derivativity in media. In film, fashion, and television, discourse on reboots and nostalgia and the death of originality have been hashed and rehashed. All this discussion had me thinking about the relationship between A.I. and originality.

If originality is dead,

will A.I. bring about the death knell

or is it a harbinger of new frontiers? 

“Art is necessarily derivative,” says Kate Alexandra, a YouTuber in her video “How to be original.” Necessarily is the word of interest here. It is not that art is derivative, it’s that to be art, it must be derivative. All art bears traces of what comes before it but original art transforms the past into a new present. 

El Greco's "View of Toledo"

In Why Writing Matters, Nicolas Delbanco describes original work as “evolutionary and with antecedents.” He ruminates on the works of authors such as James Joyce, William Blake, Virginia Wolf, and others considered pioneers in literature and the arts. He explores how through their access to art and their own unique viewpoints of the world—an example being El Greco’s artistic quirks possibly being the result of astigmatism—these people were able to produce original works. In fact, Delbanco states that from a philosophical standpoint, total originality would be incoherent as it would have no antecedent, no origin point. Originality has roots, it must be fed to produce original art.

However, popular art nowadays seems to be gorging itself on the feast of the past instead of taking morsels for inspiration. From popstars taking clothes straight from the wardrobe of Britney Spears and Madonna to the third attempt at a Jurassic Park franchise to many, many reboots of sitcoms (Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Fuller House, Raven’s Home, iCarly, Wizards of Waverly Place, etc.) we as a society are in the business of reheating nachos. It’s hard to tell sometimes what is clear evolution and what is simple imitation. It's especially hard in literature, where influences are encouraged and tropes and cliches propagate.

The lawsuit against Tracey Wolff, author of the BookTok sensation the Crave series, showcases this issue. The story goes that Lynne Freeman believes her agent, which she shared with Wolff, shared details of her story to Wolff who then put them in her series. Though the details Freeman lists in her lawsuit are similar, these tropes are also prevalent in the romantasy genre. Romantasy thrives on digestible tropes to entice readers, and the very nature of tropes is to be recognizable, not original. 

As Kate Alexandra notes, commercial fiction is driven by “what has proved recently sellable”. This is why new books compare themselves to previously popular predecessors to access a proven audience. If publishers continue to target a proven audience instead of searching for a new audiences, it may lead to a more homogenized literary landscape. It could be that the way around such homogeneity is the rise of self-publishing and more independent publishers and literary magazines. The internet has reduced the power of traditional curators of culture such as magazines and publishing houses and somewhat democratized the path to authorship. Critics may say, and have said, that such things could worsen the quality of books available, but it could also expose new audiences to original and fresh stories.

Another thing I remember about that CPC student is that their favorite author was Tobias Wolff. I didn’t know the name, but I knew one of his stories, “Bullet in the Brain”. In it, a cantankerous man is shot in the head during a bank robbery and the bulk of the story travels through his life as the bullet bores through his skull. I remember reading it in my Intro to Creative Writing class, being awed at how the obnoxious man I met at the beginning of the story could transform into someone simply reliving his best days in one final spurt. It joined the many other stories I had consumed, stories that dragged me to the end, mussed up my brain, and made my hands itch for a pencil, paper, and a spark.

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About the author: Tosin Ebunola is a writer with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Mercer University. She was previously shortlisted in the Young Creatives Nottingham competition for Creative Writing. She lives in Georgia and is a reader for the literary magazine WayWords.