Nothing New

I used to judge every book by it's cover.  I would wade through the shelves of books at Chapters or wherever else, and I'd pick up books that looked cool.  I thought I was being edgy or something, and thought it was funny to tell people, "Always judge a book by its cover."  I did find a lot of really good books this way—A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby; Arthur & George - Julian Barnes;  His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman; Others—but I'm sure I missed out on hundreds of good books along the way.

Case in point, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  The cover is beige, and has 6 pictures on it, each a different likeness of a cloud: drawings, photographs, satellite images.  The spine is beige, with Cloud Atlas written in white, in an orange box.  It looks Boring (capital intentional).  I would never have picked it up (and if I did pick it up I probably would have tossed it right back down, out of order even), if it wasn't assigned for Dr Trussler's fiction class during last Spring's semester.  Even in the UofR bookstore I was groaning to myself, thinking this book was going to bore me into dropping the class, but—no surprise I'm sure—I loved it.

20 pages in, I was enthralled. And the farther I got, the more I was completely captivated.  It's different than any novel I've ever read.  Each chapter is separated from the last by dozens of years, following only reincarnations of characters rather than actual characters.  It starts in the distant past and works to the near apocalypse of a post-apocalypse community, then works its way back to the start (Crazy right?  Read it.  It's not as confusing, and just as awesome, as it sounds).

In one of the later chapters, one of the characters is an editor for a publishing firm and is reading a potential best seller, and thinks he may have something:  "I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential. (The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, 'But it's been done a hundred times before!' —as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!)"

Mitchell's story, without the structure of the book, doesn't seem like anything new.  Good vs. Evil. Bad guys ruining the earth's environment for the sake of money.  Good guys dying when they try to uncover the Bad Guys' plans.  Servant clones end up having real personalities and souls.  The world ends and people have to revert to earlier ways of hunting and gathering and scavenging and living of the land.

Nothing new, but like I said, the novel is nothing like I've ever read before.  It was completely new to me.

The Art was in the how.  Not the What.

I'm working on a short story for my creative writing course, and I've nearly finished the first draft, so I was moving it from my notebook, to my computer.  But as I was reading and typing, I kept thinking, This whole thing is one big cliche.  I was beating myself up, and running through a scroll of different stories in my brain.  I'll admit, There is a time in the middle of every story I write in which I start to think the story sucks.  There is almost never a story I get through without this little blip; I think all of my talent or creativity or whatever has run out, and I wonder if I should just give up.  I look for this blip now, and smile when it gets here, and push through it, and get to the end.  But this time, I couldn't get over it.  I read it over about 5 times and was positive it was exactly the same story any old Joe at a coffee shop could have come up with.

And then, out of nowhere, I remembered this passage.

So then I thought, Of course it's an old story.  There is nothing new under the sun, after all (Ecclesiastes, I think).  The task of a writer who wants to be noticed or to be thought of as special in the 21st century has to work on the how as much as the what.  There isn't a lot out there that hasn't been said, or thought of.  Even Solomon (he wrote Ecclesiastes) thought there was nothing new, like 10,000 years ago.

That's not to say we should just grab some worn out cliche and twist it around and make it weird, but then maybe it is.  Maybe we have to twist our brains to think of things in an entirely different way in order to be 'new.'

I had this idea for the story.  A decent idea, but I wrote it in a way that I almost always write stories. And I guess instead of just writing a whole new piece, I've decided to rework my first one.  I'm not claiming I'll find some brilliant new way of writing stories, but I'm trying to picture this story in a way different than what I first imagined, than how I first wrote it.  I hope it will turn out OK.

No doubt it will be my masterpiece.