originality

The problem is originality.

When Joseph Maurer (yes, I'm dispensing with the nicknames. These are people you should know about, if you don't already) left for Canada, he left me a ton of comic books. He had exquisite taste in what he kept and it didn't make sense to just dump them. I'm talking original issues of Sandman, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, and a slew of more obscure titles. So it was that I just finished reading Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man.

As I reached the end of his twenty six issue run, I felt a great frustration inside of me. What he had done with Animal Man was very much like what I am doing with my SF Fringe Festival show, "Get it? Got it. Good!"

Sure, the devices he employs are different, and the message he conveys is different, but the tool of deconstruction is very similar. In both this run of comics and my play, we pull the curtain aside and reveal the gods of the medium and comment on that role and on the work of artistic creation. He uses it to complain about his limitations as a writer and his own beliefs (which he had made exquisitely clear in the course of his narratives). I use it to make statements about value judgments and our own empowerment and liberation from other people's decisions about what is good (and good for us).

So, what's my problem? It's simply that I thought I was being very daring and breaking all these narrative rules... and that Grant Morrison had done it years and years earlier. I didn't know this when I wrote the play, but that doesn't make me much happier. People who see the play, if they are comics literate, may sit there and think "oh, he's doing the Grant Morrison Animal Man thing".

I had a similar situation when I created a Flash-based-choose-your-own-adventure story for Matt Quinn's nascent internet entertainment company "MuseRealm" just before the dot bomb. I had created what I felt was a clever and original story involving a psychic assassin who could only impact things within his line of sight. His trick was to be able to telekinetically squeeze a target's heart and induce a fatal heart attack. Completely untraceable and indistinguishable from a naturally occurring death. The dot bomb happened, I never finished the piece (although it's literally only a few hours work from being done), and it has sat on my hard drive ever since. Fast forward five or six years and I am persuaded by a friend to put Babylon 5 on my Netflix queue. I watch the first season and discover a lengthy discussion of how the government is trying to develop a telekinetic who could kill someone by squeezing their heart... and that psychics can only operate within line of sight.

Fuck me.

My little interactive story will never see light of day, because an idea that I had in the late 90's had already been done on national television and I had never known it. Suddenly my little project began to look like a rip off of Babylon 5. Sure, it was developed without any knowledge of the other project, but again... that doesn't change audience perception. It's all a question of what the audience sees first.

Ultimately, does it really matter? A good story is a good story, even if parts of it seem oddly familiar. But recent news stories about a young author that (possibly unintentionally) plagiarized another novel make me think otherwise. Ostensibly, a novel she had read years earlier had so firmly set itself in her subconscious that when she attempted her own novel, up to 24 different passages had an eerie similarity to the other work. Similar enough to create an international literary incident and get her novel pulled from the shelves.

Now what strikes me as particularly interesting is that narrative structure is more volatile than raw ideas. If I wrote a story with laser swords and a Buddhistic energy field that bound the universe together, I might not be sued for ripping off Star Wars... but readers might roll their eyes a bit. But if my dialog sounded similar to lines in the film, then there might be a copyright infringement lawsuit.

At what point does it cease to be a matter of similar inspiration, drawing from the same literary tradition, or tapping into related cultural mindsets... and become plagiarism? Where is the line between two people coming up with the same idea and copying an encyclopedia article, but rephrasing it for a paper? I know I did that back in Junior High, and how many college and grad school papers are simply the regurgitating of multiple sources into a newly phrased (and heavily annotated) whole?

Identical originality, plagiarism, and academic research. They are different, but how does the end audience tell the difference? This is a question for lawyers, but it vexes me all the same. Every time I commit a new idea of mine to paper, and then find out months or years later that someone else pulled the same rabbit out of a different colored hat, it makes me wonder.

Do I really have anything original to say? Or is it just a matter of me getting to an audience first?