Tag: originality

Is It Okay for Our Stories To Be The Same?

I saw an article the other day that uncovered striking similarities between several country music hits. The blog, Saving Country Music, posted about the mashup from Greg Todd which you can view below:

Sir Mashalot (Greg Todd) took six different current hit country songs and combined them at the same key and tempo. The result produced an eerie combination of, in its rawest form, the same song.

Just recently, I was working on a jingle with a producer/songwriter. After weeks of back and forth with the producer, I gave up. He wasn’t willing to change. I bagged the project about a month ago. Why? It sounded like everything else on the radio.

The combination of these two events got me to thinking about the writing industry. You can find millions of new books each year. Yet, the majority of them read like the same book. Once you scrape away the window dressing — “tweak them with tempo and key” — you’ve got the same book.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Continue reading “Is It Okay for Our Stories To Be The Same?”

Paying the fiddler

We are told to avoid clichés. As writers, we are supposed to be original and thought-provoking. I suggest, however  – after over a quarter of a century of devising original sentences to put end to end in original works – that nothing moves a reader more than recognition.

Seeking originality, being inventive, and coming up with a piece of writing that’s totally unique has its drawbacks. It might not be liked. Readers might not understand what you are getting at. They might not see your premise. Where you are coming from might be a place they have never visited, and so not be able to identify. Or identify with. Continue reading “Paying the fiddler”