"It's all been done before." - a debatable statement. For every Elvis that "creates a new genre," there's a cadre of musicians who actually did all the work for him. Elvis may have brought it to the mainstream, but his inspiration came from other rivers, which in turn came from even more obscure tributaries, which were created by countless (but almost insignificant, on their own) drops of rain. Attributing rock and roll's creation to a single individual is a ridiculous proposition, but Elvis's success marks a clear turning point for its popularity, so we do it anyway.
The desire for credit, to feel competent, is within all of us. Ask B. F. Skinner! Glory's my favorite word for it. It's an urge as natural as the one to pee. And just like peeing, it's in our best interest to consciously control our need to Glourinate.
Any given person is probably good at something. There's a great chance that other people have given them recognition for it. That's no excuse to whip your talent out and demonstrate in public. Nobody* wants to see that.
*except the kinky minority, perhaps.
Glory serves its purpose. It motivates us to perform. It's a good reward after we've been holding it in for the whole road trip. But the second you indulge in public, somebody's gonna resent you for it, then you're gonna counter-resent them, and then you're wasting everyone's time with an unhealthy diversion. Keep it private, you'll get back to performing quicker, and then you'll find more opportunities to indulge in your private glory.
Yeah, I could stand to follow my own advice =P. Let's pretend all of that was a monologue into a mirror. What's this got to do with Arbiter and writing, though?
Well, we just went to Salt Lake Comic Con 2014. Brandons Sanderson and Mull were there! I've never read either of them. I know enough to know they're kind and charming in public. I know their fans adore them. I know people who aren't their fans think the adoration isn't deserved, and that often translates into some pretty intense criticism.
It's easy to look at their work and find room for improvement. Detractors do exactly that, and spin the absence of perfection as perfection that the authors SHOULD have attained. They don't often provide a methodology, however, and there's a good reason for that.
I wanna marry the things we talked about in this post. I wanna accept the fact that everything has been done before, to some extend. I wanna use that to preempt any potential public Glourination on my part, should I ever succeed in creating something 'innovative.' Because I want to embrace the tried and true methods of making art popular so I can put my own unique spin on those methods in order to attach a message I believe the masses need to hear.
One of the repeated messages in the Comic Con panels was 'a safe mixture for science fiction and fantasy is 50% familiar and 50% exotic.' So even if I think a particular naive tween gives Brandon Mull too much credit for Fablehaven, I'm not going to refuse to enjoy that franchise because I've forever associated it with that one annoying tween. I'm going to approach the novels as objectively as I can, weigh the positives and negatives as objectively as I can, and then be ready to use his good techniques in any scenario where they're appropriate.
They say to reach the sky, you've gotta shoot for the moon. I'm not positive that's entirely true. Sometimes I think we need to carefully measure the force with which we propel ourselves, because even if we're half as good as we want to believe we are, we might accidentally cause our own deaths by launching ourselves unprotected into the cold vacuum of orbit.
Like Maynard and Tool, like Blizzard Entertainment, like J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter, we've got to temper our innovation with that mediocre mainstream flavor. Even if we don't always measure it properly, that displays cognizance that even the most prodigious of us isn't always smarter than the masses, and that we have the capacity to be wrong. Too far, and our experiment seems extreme, foreign, threatening. Too little, and we're plagiarizing some other artist.
Comic Con again succeeded in motivating me, though perhaps not as radically as the last couple times. It reminded me of a valuable lesson, too: be able to recognize the bits of any tradition that made it worth passing to the next generation while replacing the dead weight with new components to make the whole craft more efficient. It's not a surefire method for success, but it'll help me load the dice in my favor!
Sloppy again. Weeeeeeeee...
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