DAVID BARRIE
Friday, 10th December 2010. On originality.
It may be that a touch of paranoia is inevitable once you start investing time and money in a creative endeavour. It probably has to do with the fact that labouring away at a story, song or work of art is such a nakedly personal undertaking, that you feel as anxious and protective about the result as a mother might a newly-born baby. This holds true even if you’re working in a field – genre fiction – that is self-avowedly anything but “high art”, seeking not to illuminate the human condition but simply provide a little entertainment.
Two days ago a friend told me about a forthcoming film (Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky) that apparently tells of dark deeds and tyrannical relationships within a ballet company. Since the third Franck Guerin novel, whose first draft I completed a month ago, contains some of these elements, my first reaction was that this was bad news indeed. Which is pretty strange. For a start, I have not seen the film, and based on Aronofsky’s previous work it will probably prove very different indeed from my book. More importantly, Aronofsky is a (justly) highly-rated director whose films are seen by infinitely more people than will ever read my work, so whereas I may fret about the fact that we may unwittingly be treading common ground, he’d never waste his time doing so.
What this does illustrate, is how prone we are to imagining that what we do is utterly original. There are probably countless films and books whose intrigues take place within the world of ballet, and there is at least one work dealing with murder inside the Paris Opera House (Gaston Leroux’ Le fantôme de l’Opéra) that beat me to it by a hundred years. Nanos gigantium humeris insidentes (“we are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants”) indeed.
It may be that a touch of paranoia is inevitable once you start investing time and money in a creative endeavour. It probably has to do with the fact that labouring away at a story, song or work of art is such a nakedly personal undertaking, that you feel as anxious and protective about the result as a mother might a newly-born baby. This holds true even if you’re working in a field – genre fiction – that is self-avowedly anything but “high art”, seeking not to illuminate the human condition but simply provide a little entertainment.
Two days ago a friend told me about a forthcoming film (Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky) that apparently tells of dark deeds and tyrannical relationships within a ballet company. Since the third Franck Guerin novel, whose first draft I completed a month ago, contains some of these elements, my first reaction was that this was bad news indeed. Which is pretty strange. For a start, I have not seen the film, and based on Aronofsky’s previous work it will probably prove very different indeed from my book. More importantly, Aronofsky is a (justly) highly-rated director whose films are seen by infinitely more people than will ever read my work, so whereas I may fret about the fact that we may unwittingly be treading common ground, he’d never waste his time doing so.
What this does illustrate, is how prone we are to imagining that what we do is utterly original. There are probably countless films and books whose intrigues take place within the world of ballet, and there is at least one work dealing with murder inside the Paris Opera House (Gaston Leroux’ Le fantôme de l’Opéra) that beat me to it by a hundred years. Nanos gigantium humeris insidentes (“we are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants”) indeed.