ON “ON ORIGINALITY” BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

At the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group we’ve been reading Novelist as a Vocation by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who is one of my favorite novelists of all time. The book is a collection of essays Murakami wrote in part for the magazine Monkey Business and this morning I read the essay: “On Originalty,” which, as all good essays ought, left me with as many questions as answers.

Like Murakami, I tend to believe that “ ‘Originality’ is a living, evolving thing, whose shape is devilishly hard to pin down.” It’s also something I believe we should all be striving for, even those of us writing within what sometimes feels like and is often called the “confines” of a genre. I addressed this in different ways in different places, myself, including The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, in a chapter called “Keep It Fresh”:

Use every archetype in the genre toolbox, but make them your own. 

What unique twists can you put on a robot or an elf? Appeal to all five senses. C-3PO has a distinctive voice, for instance. Elves usually have pointed ears, but do they have to? Could they have unusual eyes? Could your elves have inherent magical powers that no other author has ascribed to them? Ask questions. The most difficult hurdle any new writer has to cross is the line between original and derivative.

And I suffered over it in Writing Monsters as well:

And now the gauntlet has been thrown down to challenge this generation’s imagination. Monsters are getting weirder. In fact, everything’s getting weirder, because everybody is looking for that original space to inhabit—and maybe that space is in the strangely metaphorical fairy tale universe of Miyazaki or the unsettling nightmare world of del Toro. Maybe it’s a new combination of familiar elements that gave us Twilight or Cloverfield, but as technology has improved how monsters can be brought to life, have our imaginations in some way lagged behind? 

The still extant anti-genre/anti-“popular fiction” literati might have us believe that the very fact of a genre makes it impossible to be original. Once we choose to confine ourselves to writing fantasy all we can manage is a pastiche of The Lord of the Rings, or some even earlier text—maybe Beowulf. Though even then, J.R.R. Tolkien himself, in “On Fairy Stories,” encouraged us to use fantasy archetypes in our own way, so fantasy can be original from story to story and from author to author:

It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count.

Even with that testimony to the contrary, if we accept that genre fiction is inherently unoriginal, won’t we have to go the next, even final step and embrace what Roland Barthes put forward in “The Death of the Author”?

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.

So we’re all a bunch of hacks, standing on the shoulders of giants. Please don’t let any of the sad proponents of AI/LLM as a “tool” for writers get wind of that.

In any case, of course you know I don’t accept either assertion, and not only continue to call for but more often that not find in fantasy, science fiction, and horror in particular tremendous variety—and that variety is the result of originality. But that said, what does “originality” actually mean? What does it actually look like? Murakami attempted to answer that in “On Originality” in this way:

In my opinion, an artist must fulfill the following three basic requirements to be deemed “original”:

1. The artist must possess a clearly unique and individual style (of sound, language, or color). Moreover, that uniqueness should be immediately perceivable on first sight (or hearing).

2. That style must have the power to update itself. It should grow with time, never resting in the same place for long, since it expresses an internal and spontaneous process of self-reinvention.

3. Over time, that characteristic style should become integrated within the psyche of its audience, to become a part of their basic standard of evaluation. Subsequent generations of artists should see that style as a rich resource from which they can draw.

Speaking to the first point, this is a matter of developing our own individual voices, and moving always in whatever direction—or directions—that may take us. As Murakami himself wrote:

From the outset, I had a pretty clear idea of the novels I wanted to create. I could even picture what they should look like, once I had developed my skills to the point where I could write them. The novels floated directly above me, shining in the sky like the North Star. If I felt lost, all I had to do was look up. They would give me my location, and point me in the right direction. Had they not been there, I might well have ended up wandering all over the place.

For the second point, I agree that it’s of vital importance that we all continue to grow as authors, continue to push ourselves, continue to explore, and continue to alternately, or even simultaneously, achieve greatness and fall to disaster. This is what William Deresiewicz was getting at in “Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity,” in which he took on the guillotine blade hanging over every artist as we continue to be dragged to our deaths by the tech industry.

AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes. Sometimes they  are mistakes, recognized, in retrospect, as happy accidents. That is what originality is, by definition: a low-probability choice, a choice that has never been made.

Then finally, all unique, mistake-prone human artists are pushed to find some champion, some outlet, some… well, let’s just say it: publisher to recognize that what we’ve done is worthy of presentation in our time. In “What Writers and Editors Do,” Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote:

In the literary world, much is about originality, finding an individual voice, uncovering what until now has been unseen—these are the ideals. Against this stands the concept of quality, the basis of all appraisal, and of any canonization. For when originality, individual voice, and the unseen come together there is nothing with which it can be compared. There is no unequivocal way of saying that something is “good.” When the book is there, with the publisher’s logo on the cover, that in itself is a stamp of quality: a large number of people with fine literary credentials, working in a well-reputed institution, have declared that this is literature, that this book is of value. 

…until we’re all inevitably consigned to the whims of time and tide, leaving future generations of readers to judge our work, and even ourselves.

I’ll let Murakami have the last word, addressing how to start:

…as a writer I wanted to remain spiritually free, beholden to no one. To write my novels the way I wanted, according to the schedule I myself laid out. This was my bottom line, my assertion of authorial independence.

That’s it, authors: You do you.

—Philip Athans

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