Yesterday I was talking to David Lipsky, who is my independent study advisor and thesis advisor.  We were examining the structures and characterizations of books that might help me with editing my current novel project, and at some point he said something along the lines of: “Every book is fanfiction for some other book.”  And I thought, huh.  That’s actually pretty true.

We all know that pretty much all new writing we see these days derivative — every writer is inspired by books that already exist.  Every idea and plot and structure you could possibly conjure up in your brain probably has a 99.9999999999% of having already been done.  It ends up just being a question of whether it can be done again in a fresh, interesting way.

Just now I started rereading The Chronicles Of Prydain because I wanted to examine how all the major arcs are set up.  I kept pausing to read parts of it out loud to my boyfriend and laugh at how much it Lloyd Alexander was influenced by Tolkien.  I read these books way before I ever knew what Lord of the Rings was, so I never made the connection. And of course we knew the material was derivative to begin with because it explicitly draws a lot of stuff directly from the Mabinogion – but also SO MUCH is clearly taken from Tolkien. Dallben is pretty much Gandalf’s cousin.  Gwydion basically IS Aragorn.  The Gwythaints are not far off from being Winged Nazgûl.  The description of Annuvin pretty closely matches Tolkien’s description of Mordor.  But even with all these derivative components, the series overall is still very different from Lord of the Rings.  It’s a coming of age story.  It’s targeted at a much younger reader.  It’s packed with short, economical prose.

Often when I have conversations with writerly friends, we talk about books like those.  It comes up that X ”is totally ripped off of” Y.  We always discuss it with irritation and condescension — but then I think: why?  If it’s published, if it’s successful, if it’s an enjoyable read, then ultimately, does it even matter that we can easily see what inspired it?  Especially when we’re all still trying to become published authors ourselves…who are we to sneer at someone who has already achieved that goal?  Can we really expect ourselves to write something totally new and original?

Maybe when we feel the urge to be snobbish about derivative material our only real takeaway can be that, based on our tastes, we find writing to be most successful when it’s not immediately apparent where it’s derived from.