I think everyone who ever wanted to create something eventually found themselves worrying if their idea was identical to someone else's. It's like there's this pressure to be original in a world where storytelling is older than many buildings in europe or the pyramids in Egypt.

I know I have struggled with this. Every new idea soon discarded because it sounded too similar to Hunger Games or Agatha Christie or that series that one transphobic jackass of a woman created. It wasn't always about the big things. Sometimes it was also about the smallest of details. The Transphobic woman got the robes inspired by my culture, and while I do appreciate that bit, I used to worry people might think I was copying her just because I mentioned them. It's silly, I know. But it was something I truly struggled with back then. So many things I had wished to write about and add to my little worlds that I wouldn't because I was scared all and any work I did would be dismissed as a mere lazy copy.

Then I grew up and adopted a new motto: ORIGINALITY IS DEAD. Edgy, I know but at the time, I had come to believe that there was no such thing as an original thought anymore. That our species was too old for that. There wasn't an original joke, an original painting, an original book, an original anything. Therefore, I assumed it didn't exist at all. It did offer me some comfort. How could one be pressured by being unique when uniqueness was something no one could truly obtain? The answer was easy: you couldn't. However, I hadn't seen the bigger picture back then. Maybe I was too immature to see it. Maybe straight-up denying its existence had given me a sense of control or power over my writing that I had lacked the years before.

Needless to say, I don't believe that anymore. Instead, I propose a different motto: Originality isn't dead, its meaning only changed. 

Not one work is the same, unless you fully copied someone else. Originality, in my opinion, isn't creating a never-seen-before work. It's finding the tales we've consumed and transforming them into something our own. Now, I don't mean you should take the Hunger Games' plot and copy beat for beat to create your Famished Plays book. No. A good example for me is Infinity Sun by Adam Silvera (yes, it's clearly my favourite book). All throughout the book you can see much of the same beats as the X-Men. For example, You see how people with superpowers are held with disdain and abused my those with legislative power, much like the mutants are in X-Men. And yet, not once do you think you're reading a prose translation of the first season of the X-Men: The Animated Series. You see the influence it had and you see the same themes, but the story is different. The characters are different. The base and the identity is different. That's what, to me, is Originality.

I'm not writing this to convince you that this is the only right way to see Originality. No, instead, I hope that by sharing my own view of what it is, maybe the pressure many of us feels to set our work apart will ease even if just for a blink. I'd set a comment section here if I could, but I still haven't figured out this website thing completely.

With that said, I hope your day gets a little bit better and that your coffee is always the right degree of hot. Let's make this journey a little less lonely and a little bit easier!