Repackaging Old Stuff For Fun And Profit
Let’s talk about coming up with material.
Most material comes from the creative bit at the back of your brain, and that’s how everyone expects it to go every time. It leads to the myth that artists are creative geniuses with divine flashes of inspiration that are brought by nubile spirits at their whim.
There’s something magical about creation, but if you wait for muses to appear for you, you’ll have an empty dinner plate more often than not.
What if there were a better way?
What if there were oceans of material that you could just tap into at any point?
You could go to this library and find things that were appropriate to your life and put your own spin on them. Then you could apply your own knowledge and experience to the situation and use it to create something entirely new.
Wouldn’t That Be Funny?
People have asked me about Jordan Peterson. He is the new guru god to the self-help crowd.
People also ask me about writing fiction and where they can draw inspiration.
And my answers to the two of those things are the same.
Take a dip into the Akashic Library of historical human thought, and you’ll find why self-help works and you’ll find how to build better stories.
The blueprints are there.
Hear The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
It’s always better to show than tell, so let me show you what I mean.
This is the introduction to Rime Of The Ancient Mariner:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st hear the merry din.’
He holds him with his skinny hand,
‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.
‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
The poem is a masterclass in storytelling, and also meta-fiction.
It tells of an ancient mariner, cursed for a sin against god and the world, condemned to tell his story to everyone that they don’t repeat his mistake.
It’s incredibly powerful and meta-fictional because at some point, you realise that the cursed old man telling his story isn’t enthralling the poem’s wedding guest in a bid to save them from the curse – he’s telling you.
And so neatly we have wrapped up a story of God, nature and enchantment by the power of story.
That Is Not Dead Which May Eternal Lie…
Now, such treasure troves of wisdom could be relegated to English degrees and dusty old hallways never to be repeated again.
Or you can bring them to life.
Most people who are aware of Rime of The Ancient Mariner didn’t come into their knowledge through an English degree and a dusty old library though.
They came through it via this heavy metal song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7zk4as9kzA
And here’s where people get the whole storytelling, plagiarism, pastiche and inspiration thing wrong.
You cannot listen to the Iron Maiden song and think for one minute that it’s pastiche, parody or a copy of the original poem.
They are in many ways completely unrelated. There aren’t really any direct quotes, it’s not a poem, everything is different.
It’s an entirely original work with the same name and same story, but totally different in pretty much everything.
Some people would say, “Yeah but it’s just heavy metal it’s stupid and not art” and those people are 100% morons.
The medium appeals to a certain set of people, and the people who don’t like it don’t matter.
But anyway…
The Span Of Humanity
As biological humans, we’re at least 200,000 years old as a species.
That means that you’re virtually indistinguishable from UG the caveman from 100,000 years ago.
An amazing misperception that people have is assuming that the struggles and conditions we have now are all that different from previous generations of human.
The situations and precise details aren’t, but the human struggle is old.
The works that have survived to this point have done so because they illuminate the human condition.
A war manual from thousands of years ago works in principle.
Books of moral codes still apply now.
Art can touch people hundreds or thousands of years into the future.
And yet people sit on all this received wisdom and say, “I don’t know what to talk about.”
Hit up the human history library and give the world your interpretation.
Who knows, you might make that arts degree pay for itself if you do!