Funny thing is, this was maybe even harder to learn than you are NOT a special butterfly.
Once I had accepted the fact that I would have to do all the learning and practicing and following of the rules that I had thought to skip, I suddenly started to wonder why I should bother writing at all.
The evidence: my special rebel plan turned out to have been used by thousands of other people who wanted to skip doing the work. Every book on writing I had read up to that point warned against falling for that exact trap, so obviously the people writing those books had seen this problem before — experienced it themselves, witnessed it in others. Enough that they felt they had to warn against it. Over. And over.
And really, my stories were what? A lot of copies of writers I admired. Sometimes painfully obvious copies of other writers. So not only were my plans to be an awesome rebel already taken — a lot — my stories were also already taken. A lot.
At around the time I started to feel really unoriginal and pretty worthless and began to consider a job in wearing a suit and not thinking for myself much, I came across a book that purported to list every plotline ever thought of by a human being ever. There were 20. The book explained the 20 was a fairly arbitrary number, because some people lumped some plots together in one category, while others spliced them into a few more. But 20 was roughly it. There were only 20 types of story out there, from the dawn of time until this moment. I read the book and couldn’t argue. There really are only 20 plotlines, depending on how you name them. I thought, wow. I should REALLY not bother at all anymore. In fact, none of us should. Why write another word of fiction when every story’s been told? We’re all copy-cats, every one of us.
I didn’t stop writing this time, but I poked at it like you might poke a cold pancake that you really don’t want to eat, but you really don’t want to throw away. Erm. Do I, or don’t I? It’s all been done. Nothing is original. How can I find anything to say at all anymore?
But I kept coming across more advice not to give up. Even the book of 20 plotlines had a whole chapter at the end about not being discouraged because nothing’s ever truly new; it’s the way you tell the same story that makes it interesting, the characters you put into it, the drama that unfolds, the metaphors and descriptions that are yours alone. Plots might be the same the world over for all time, but how those plots are used is different every time, and that’s what makes them special.
That encouragement didn’t take right away. Once you’ve beaten yourself down about something, it can be hard to recover. And telling yourself “You are NOT original, knock it off!” and realizing it’s true, that’s a downer. Once that was in my brain, hearing anything else was tough.
And I’m not original. No one is. Not truly. But unique? Yes. That I’ve got. We’ve all got it. You may be a human being, you may have to make the same mistakes as everyone else and take the same classes and learn the same lessons and do the same work, but you are still a unique human being with a viewpoint and experience all your own.
I’m not an exception to the rules. But that doesn’t mean that if I follow the rules and work hard, I won’t be lead somewhere truly fantastic, and grow my uniqueness into something beautiful. It just means it will take as long as it takes anyone else to get there, and I will have to work as hard as anyone else, and I will have to polish my uniqueness until it shows instead of just assuming everyone can see it with the naked eye.
I may not be a special butterfly, but I am one seriously special butterfly.
