Prompt 2

Despite the possible misinterpretation of his words, Foster does not mean every story is part of an ongoing story. He means that nothing is created without inspiration. He believes, "the one story, the ur-story, is about ourselves, about what it means to be human" (Foster, 186). He believes it is intentional. On a level, this is true, but the one story is also coincidental. It is not part of our nature to create new ideas from thin air. It is the reason we are unable to concieve of new colors and sounds. Humans are not capable of creating a new face in their imaginations, so while stories sharing similarities with a referencing other stories are often intentional, the more subtle similarities can be caused by out inability to be entirely original. Foster mentions "the one story" not only to help us identify when an author is referencing another piece but also to help us appreciate authors more. Often when an author uses a well known story to bring depth to their work, they are labeled as unoriginal or lacking in creativity. This mentality fails to take into consideration the writer's process to work an old piece of literature into their writing or to make and old ides their own. Imagine if the large majority od society decided that the inventor of the car was drawing too much inspiration from wagons. That is absurd because although the early cars were similar to wagons, they were obviously different and an innovation. Writers who use older texts as inspiration or extra dimension should be viewed in the same light.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 31, 2017 at 7:34 PM

    I completely agree that it is crazy for authors to be insulted and called unoriginal by bouncing of another’s ideas. It’s stylistic and creates depth to the story. Using inspiration from another idea is an innovation to make the previous idea better or more developed as shown by your example with the car; it isn’t stealing from the original creator or, in this case of literature, writer. Like you said, humans aren’t particularly designed to create new things from thin air; it’s just a development from a different thought, and that goes in an endless cycle. All stories have already been made. There are only different versions of them.

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  2. UnknownAugust 1, 2017 at 4:17 PM

    I agree and also believe that it is human nature to take an idea that may not be one's own, then add onto it. All of us on this blog are doing that currently. We are taking someone else's posts, then adding our ideas to the comments. While we may have used a thought that was not our own to begin, the end result was still original content because it is unlike any other. To add to that, people should not bash writers for using any sort of content from another work. Most ideas or thoughts that people have are not original as they likely got them from another place. For example, people use facts and statistics they have read, yet the information is only relayed as they saw it from another place. Thus, it would be hypocritical to call someone unoriginal. As it is known, statistics can be used for many different purposes. A group of people can be given the same statistic to start a research paper, yet every person could have a completely different paper. Just as J.K. Rowling can use many references to Greek Mythology in Harry Potter, yet end up with a revolutionary and original work.

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