referential fiction and 'originality'
May. 18th, 2021 04:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serpentinemalignWhat do you do as a fiction writer when most of your conceptual library is built up on media that’s referencing other media?
By which I mean, you think of the shining examples of stories that grabbed you start to finish, and it's almost all media that is a creative 'adaptation' or parody of an existing work, or it's a pastiche or deconstruction of an existing genre, or a combination of different genres. It's also often media with a specific aesthetic that is intended to draw on a past 'retro' aesthetic. For me personally I am thinking specifically of Venture Bros., Team Fortress 2 (which isn't a linear story, besides in the comics, but it sure got my attention), The Incredibles (okay, we get it, you like 60s/70s aesthetics), almost every genre that functions as a revival of a 'classic' genre (neo-noir is one example). In some regards, sure, I could be talking about most media because nothing is original, but here I specifically mean media where the basic premise is inherently referential.
What do you do when you don't really like the works being referenced as much as the referential work? As in, you don't have much motivation to seek out more of the 'original sources' that influenced whatever you liked, because the examples you have seen/read give you a decent sense of the vibe but, for you, they don't pack the same punch or provide the same enjoyment? Because it's something about the dialogue between the two parts, between the past and the contemporary, rather than necessarily the original work in isolation. A lot of my music tastes reflect this idea of ‘dialogue’ too — I love sample-based music, like plunderphonics and mashups. I love it when people put together songs and genres I never thought could be combined. But in a lot of those cases, the sum of its parts is the appeal for me, and not necessarily the original.
I love artists who wear their influences on their sleeves and poach as much as they can get away with. I'm not so concerned about having an in-depth knowledge of the sources they're referencing, because obviously the references aren't all of why I like the media in question, but the parts which reference and adapt clearly must have some value to me because this keeps showing up in all my favourite works and genres. And I'm not really sure why, and I’m not sure how to use that in my own work.
I totally agree with the idea of ‘stealing like an artist’. I just don’t know what to do when a lot of my favourite media is so explicitly made from stolen parts. I have no idea how to emulate that same approach in my own work in a way that feels authentic. Were I to take that same approach, I would be drawing from a body of work that is so referential that it would lose the foundation of those ‘original elements’ and become something fairly ignorant and surface-level. Perhaps I am valorising originality when there’s no such thing, but I do feel like there’s something different about the media of the past, let’s say, 20-30 years. The media I grew up with in the 90s/2000s was so eager to comment about itself and its place in relation to an existing corpus of works, or in a particular genre. Though it might be sincere in its admiration for its forebears, it was also willing to critique them and play with insincerity. It didn’t take itself or the tenets of its source works too seriously. It leaves me wondering where I go, because I wish I had an answer for ‘taking from my influences’ that didn't feel like cheating, somehow.
Maybe I just internalised the college rule of thumb of “don’t quote someone quoting someone else” a little too hard. Maybe when I was a kid I just read too many YouTube comments that go something like: “like if you were here before the scrubs from [popular media that referenced this scene/song/etc] got here”. Except substitute ‘scrubs’ for, like, a slur, probably.
The general landscape of fan culture, both in transformative fandom spaces and in more general ‘film/music/General Pop Culture nerd’ spaces, makes me feel rather ignorant and unwelcome. There is an unspoken list of 'canonical works' (or sometimes there’s an actually circulated list of canonical works! but be careful, because if you rely too hard on the list, you’re a poser!) and you sort of gain a grounding in the major events of these works just by osmosis, just by being in fan spaces. But I have gotten so into the habit of doing that, just to fit in and avoid mockery, that I almost forget to check things out for myself. Besides the fact that trying new stuff can be difficult for me anyway, because I struggle to get into anything that isn’t vaguely in the same key as whatever other piece of media I’m obsessed with at the time.
Maybe I’m overthinking this, maybe it’s the low self-esteem and paranoia and rejection sensitivity, maybe it is always the present’s folly to think it’s doing something new and meta because I mean, a lot of literature from hundreds of years ago is also littered with references and tributes and retellings, maybe it’s just an aesthetic preference and it's totally fine to have a retro kind of aesthetic while not knowing absolutely everything about it.
I didn’t really have a conclusion to this or anything like that. I just wanted to get these words out because this has been bothering me for quite a while, and although I’m at the point of accepting that every work of fiction is an interconnected web, I’m not quite at the point of understanding my own (original) work’s place in it.
By which I mean, you think of the shining examples of stories that grabbed you start to finish, and it's almost all media that is a creative 'adaptation' or parody of an existing work, or it's a pastiche or deconstruction of an existing genre, or a combination of different genres. It's also often media with a specific aesthetic that is intended to draw on a past 'retro' aesthetic. For me personally I am thinking specifically of Venture Bros., Team Fortress 2 (which isn't a linear story, besides in the comics, but it sure got my attention), The Incredibles (okay, we get it, you like 60s/70s aesthetics), almost every genre that functions as a revival of a 'classic' genre (neo-noir is one example). In some regards, sure, I could be talking about most media because nothing is original, but here I specifically mean media where the basic premise is inherently referential.
What do you do when you don't really like the works being referenced as much as the referential work? As in, you don't have much motivation to seek out more of the 'original sources' that influenced whatever you liked, because the examples you have seen/read give you a decent sense of the vibe but, for you, they don't pack the same punch or provide the same enjoyment? Because it's something about the dialogue between the two parts, between the past and the contemporary, rather than necessarily the original work in isolation. A lot of my music tastes reflect this idea of ‘dialogue’ too — I love sample-based music, like plunderphonics and mashups. I love it when people put together songs and genres I never thought could be combined. But in a lot of those cases, the sum of its parts is the appeal for me, and not necessarily the original.
I love artists who wear their influences on their sleeves and poach as much as they can get away with. I'm not so concerned about having an in-depth knowledge of the sources they're referencing, because obviously the references aren't all of why I like the media in question, but the parts which reference and adapt clearly must have some value to me because this keeps showing up in all my favourite works and genres. And I'm not really sure why, and I’m not sure how to use that in my own work.
I totally agree with the idea of ‘stealing like an artist’. I just don’t know what to do when a lot of my favourite media is so explicitly made from stolen parts. I have no idea how to emulate that same approach in my own work in a way that feels authentic. Were I to take that same approach, I would be drawing from a body of work that is so referential that it would lose the foundation of those ‘original elements’ and become something fairly ignorant and surface-level. Perhaps I am valorising originality when there’s no such thing, but I do feel like there’s something different about the media of the past, let’s say, 20-30 years. The media I grew up with in the 90s/2000s was so eager to comment about itself and its place in relation to an existing corpus of works, or in a particular genre. Though it might be sincere in its admiration for its forebears, it was also willing to critique them and play with insincerity. It didn’t take itself or the tenets of its source works too seriously. It leaves me wondering where I go, because I wish I had an answer for ‘taking from my influences’ that didn't feel like cheating, somehow.
Maybe I just internalised the college rule of thumb of “don’t quote someone quoting someone else” a little too hard. Maybe when I was a kid I just read too many YouTube comments that go something like: “like if you were here before the scrubs from [popular media that referenced this scene/song/etc] got here”. Except substitute ‘scrubs’ for, like, a slur, probably.
The general landscape of fan culture, both in transformative fandom spaces and in more general ‘film/music/General Pop Culture nerd’ spaces, makes me feel rather ignorant and unwelcome. There is an unspoken list of 'canonical works' (or sometimes there’s an actually circulated list of canonical works! but be careful, because if you rely too hard on the list, you’re a poser!) and you sort of gain a grounding in the major events of these works just by osmosis, just by being in fan spaces. But I have gotten so into the habit of doing that, just to fit in and avoid mockery, that I almost forget to check things out for myself. Besides the fact that trying new stuff can be difficult for me anyway, because I struggle to get into anything that isn’t vaguely in the same key as whatever other piece of media I’m obsessed with at the time.
Maybe I’m overthinking this, maybe it’s the low self-esteem and paranoia and rejection sensitivity, maybe it is always the present’s folly to think it’s doing something new and meta because I mean, a lot of literature from hundreds of years ago is also littered with references and tributes and retellings, maybe it’s just an aesthetic preference and it's totally fine to have a retro kind of aesthetic while not knowing absolutely everything about it.
I didn’t really have a conclusion to this or anything like that. I just wanted to get these words out because this has been bothering me for quite a while, and although I’m at the point of accepting that every work of fiction is an interconnected web, I’m not quite at the point of understanding my own (original) work’s place in it.
