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2/6/24 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akjeCurrently reading this book about how to read like a professor, and I want to put some of the quotes on post-its and stick them to my wall. One that's pertinent to my writing group is about originality. There's always someone who says, "Nothing's original; it's all been written before," and that always boggles me. I only know one book about a shark attacking an island resort with an aquaphobic sheriff, and I only know one book about a Kansas schoolgirl who gets swept up in a tornado, then lands in a country with talking lions, scarecrows and tin men. So presumably we can all write a book that's one of a kind if we just use our noggins.
But the author of this book puts it better than I can. I suppose it's okay to post one little paragraph. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
❝John Barth discusses an Egyptian papyrus complaining that all the stories have been told and that therefore nothing remains for the contemporary writer but to retell them. That papyrus describing the postmodern condition is 4500 years old. This is not a terrible thing, though. Writers notice all the time that their characters resemble somebody ─ Persephone, Pip, Long John Silver, La Belle Dame sans Merci ─ and they go with it. What happens, if the writer is good, is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers.❞
─ Thomas Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor
But the author of this book puts it better than I can. I suppose it's okay to post one little paragraph. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
❝John Barth discusses an Egyptian papyrus complaining that all the stories have been told and that therefore nothing remains for the contemporary writer but to retell them. That papyrus describing the postmodern condition is 4500 years old. This is not a terrible thing, though. Writers notice all the time that their characters resemble somebody ─ Persephone, Pip, Long John Silver, La Belle Dame sans Merci ─ and they go with it. What happens, if the writer is good, is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers.❞
─ Thomas Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor