Every writer, great, good, or otherwise, really only has one story to write, and s/he keeps on writing it over and over.
Or, in the case of Harper Lee, just the once, then mic drop.
And that's how you kill a mockingbird. Bitches.
The natural impulse, of course, is to find your favorite super-diverse-catalog and smash it up in the speaker's face to prove her utterly, painfully wrong.
"Umm, ever heard of SO-AND SO?" the impulse says snarkily. "Pretty sure book one and book four were NOTHING alike." (I assume, at this point, that you're talking about Harry Potter, and points to you for that.)
Except maybe they were.
If I, personally, were to test the theory, I'd start with authors whose books are all incredibly imaginative, folks like Roald Dahl who seem to produce utterly new, totally bizarre, completely different stories every time.
So let's take him. Witches, peaches, giants, incipient diabetes, telekinesis, and adult stories that give you creepy-crawly nightmare giggles. All over the place, right?
If you look closer, though, all Dahl's children's stories feature misunderstood, extraordinary kids being thwarted by vicious, close-minded, stupid adults. That's the basic pattern, every single time. And in the end, the bright child wins, but there's always a bleakness; the world is still populated by the Wormwoods and ruled by the Trunchbuls. There's still a child who would prefer to stay a bewitched mouse rather than return to his neglectful parents. The immediate evil is thwarted, but a darkness lurks around the edges, unilluminated by the minor triumph on the page (which ties his children's writing to his adult short fiction, all of which is darkly funny, emphasis on dark, in a world that remains emphatically inhospitable).
If you look closer, though, all Dahl's children's stories feature misunderstood, extraordinary kids being thwarted by vicious, close-minded, stupid adults. That's the basic pattern, every single time. And in the end, the bright child wins, but there's always a bleakness; the world is still populated by the Wormwoods and ruled by the Trunchbuls. There's still a child who would prefer to stay a bewitched mouse rather than return to his neglectful parents. The immediate evil is thwarted, but a darkness lurks around the edges, unilluminated by the minor triumph on the page (which ties his children's writing to his adult short fiction, all of which is darkly funny, emphasis on dark, in a world that remains emphatically inhospitable).
Okay, but that's just one author. What about...
Take your pick. I won't be able to set them up and knock them down one by one, and it's possible there are dozens of authors that I'd knee-jerk agree seem totally original, each story a standalone marvel unlike anything else s/he's produced.
Take your pick. I won't be able to set them up and knock them down one by one, and it's possible there are dozens of authors that I'd knee-jerk agree seem totally original, each story a standalone marvel unlike anything else s/he's produced.
But if you asked an author who's willing to admit s/he's not a literary god* whether his or her stories were really just one fundamental story in different clothing every time, I bet s/he'd be able to find the thread, even if you can't see it right away.
Some of the resemblance might be superficial--preference for a form, or a point of view, or a time period. I, for one, am far too lazy to ever set a book anywhere but the generally-modern, mostly real world (at least at the moment).
More telling are the thematic tics. The need to return to one idea over and over, viewing it from different angles, maybe, but always putting it in your sights. Whether or not it's conscious, all my books deal, on some level, with people's utter unknowability to one another, and their total inability to control what happens to them, at least in any meaningful way (trust me, that makes me sound WAY deeper than I am--my work is equally interested in the theme of scatological humor).
I may not always write the same story, but I'm always returning to the same underlying concerns, which may amount to the same thing.
What do you think? Are we all subconsciously self-imitating? Can you find me an author whose every work is truly standalone?
*Always a risky bet
Some of the resemblance might be superficial--preference for a form, or a point of view, or a time period. I, for one, am far too lazy to ever set a book anywhere but the generally-modern, mostly real world (at least at the moment).
More telling are the thematic tics. The need to return to one idea over and over, viewing it from different angles, maybe, but always putting it in your sights. Whether or not it's conscious, all my books deal, on some level, with people's utter unknowability to one another, and their total inability to control what happens to them, at least in any meaningful way (trust me, that makes me sound WAY deeper than I am--my work is equally interested in the theme of scatological humor).
I may not always write the same story, but I'm always returning to the same underlying concerns, which may amount to the same thing.
What do you think? Are we all subconsciously self-imitating? Can you find me an author whose every work is truly standalone?
*Always a risky bet
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