MetaFic

. . . in my field (computer architecture, or for the lay person, microprocessor design plus related components): "Nothing new has been invented since the 60's." On the one hand, it's a bit of an extreme position, and technically not true. On the other hand, it's actually pretty accurate to a large extent. The 1940's through the 1960's saw the bulk of novelty hammered out, and the rest from the early 70's onward has been an engineering exercise.

Arguably, the same argument has been applied with the same precision to human stories. Most of the ideas were worked out centuries ago, and current stories only reflect updated revisions or blends of the old. What truly new development in story telling has occurred in the past 50 years that did not exist in some form before it? The past 250 years?

The printing press may have made dissemination easier, but the core ideas of stories have been alive at least as long as humans have. Is that sci-fi epic of space flight and battles so different from sailing the seas? Or traveling the breadth of a continent? Or simply moving from one village to another?

Perhaps the right question is to examine the degree of separation from the prior work while constructing a universe framework upon which to build the story? The quality of the writing will dictate other aspects, but the universe seems to depict the "originality" metric.

(And "fake" football? Well, it's not football as per the rest of the world, but that doesn't make it fake. It's not as tough as rugby, but it's not easy either. Interesting word choice for it. I wonder how many pigskin ball fanatics will pop up in this thread for it.)

As far as JKR goes I think the answer is both and through the release of the series this was oft debated particulary in looking for clues as to future books.

As for 'fake' football.... well thats a debate I'll avoid getting into but I have played and do enjoy both.

I don't think it's original. Nothing really is, when you thing about it. Just a retelling of a story. Childrens' books for years have been stories of magic and (usually) 3 chums who set for an adventure. Enid Blyden is written all over the Potter series. She wrote out these adventure stories in the 1930's to 1940's. In the late 1970's there was a book about a 10 year girl who discovered she was a witch and went to a school to learn how to become one. So for originality, the Potter books are not that unique, centuries about stories aside.

I was amused about the comment Josh gave. Computers have been around since the 1940s. Certainly they were calculators and ideas about them were out there years before. There were always mechanical versions. People were always tired of adding numbers themselves.

Unless based on specific events from someone's life, how many stories are truly "original"? The Broadway musical "Westside Story" is a rework of "Romeo and Juliet;" which was, I think, an adaptation/inspired by the Arthurian Romance "Tristan and Isolde;" which was probably based on some other oral tale lost in the mists of time. The whole bit about Harry's capacity to love is misconstrued by many fanfics as an overly romantic and emotional relationship between Harry and Ginny. While oddly satisfying in a way it also has led to fans complaining about the lack of Harry/Ginny time in her story. However, Jo took her inspiration for Harry's capacity to love from John's Gospel verse "No greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for another."

What I'm saying is much of literature today is derivative; the originality comes in how the story is told.

Ahem. Disclaimer... The phrase "oddly satisifying in a way" is how Ginny described the fairy tale "Cinderella" in St. Margarets story "Six Days." See, not original, merely a derivative used from somewhere else!

I look at fiction writing like quilt making. If you are not familiar with quilts, they come from a time when the effort it took to make cloth was so great that spare scraps and worn and damage clothes were valuable. People would take the scraps and sew then together into a new useful item. Blankets were the most common product of quilting, but dresses, shirts, pants, and drapes were also made. Over time, people moved from just making utilitarian quilts, to ones that also took the old scraps and made beautiful works of art. Many quilts carry the history of generations in them, passed down from mother to daughter. Each generation embellishing and adding until the quilt is so much more.

Our oral and literary history is much like that. Throughout our lives, we gain scraps of knowledge and tales and fables. They color our view of the world, and we use them in our life, many times without even knowing it. Writers take all those scraps of legend and myth and tales and start putting them together and fitting with other scraps of knowledge. The result is a new story made from an old story.

The real question is how good of a quilter is the writer? Rowling made a fun and colorful tapestry. I don't see a great deal of depth in her work, but it is still a simple, and compelling pattern. I look at the tapestry woven by Lloyd Alexander, which is a very detailed re-writing of Celtic and Gaelic myth, and I am often amazed at the depth and detail of his work. He took some very old and obscure scraps and created a wonderful quilt.

So, is Rowling's work original? Yes. Just because it uses scraps of our shared mythos does not make in any less original. She was creative enough to put them together in a story that has all of us quilting from.

- “Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word ["I"]. What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest

Having done Children's Lit this is something I looked at - the idea of originality. We had a course called The Power of Story and basically looked at what is a story and what makes it compelling because nothing is entirely new.

If you look at genres Harry Potter fits into more than one and takes threads of several of them. Here's but no means a substantial list.

It's a hero tale. Child removed from world and put in isolation only to return to the world and save it in some way. Think King Arthur.

In that way it has elements of Legend but that's a genre that requires longevity that HP cannot have. A Legend is made up of an heroic tale but it has to have the hsitory behind it to get labelled a legend. It's still a hero's tale.

Another aspect of that, the hero's tale or legend is The Quest. Harry Potter has The Quest in spades. Particularly DH.

So it has all those epical legendary, heroic things going for it that is typically associated with mythology. But it is clearly not mythology.

After all, it's a Boarding School Story. This is a typically British construct - indeed made famous over and over by Enid Blyton. It's also got those Mystery/Adventure elements that sprang up post WWII becasue - that's what children like to read. The top genre with both boys and girls from age 8-12 is Adventure/Mystery/Detective.

It's also firmly Fantasy - it has all the elements of High Fantasy with a secondary world and made up creatures and so on.

There are also several aspects that are borrowed. Centaurs, Trolls, magic, witches are not a new idea, Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans have origins in Willy Wonka and so on.

The originality is in NONE of these things. These are all things that make up our world, our culture. But she put them together in a new way, with some new ideas to make a new world. And that's the crux of it. The new world, the characters.

Most stories have already been told. You will find elements of it somewhere else, it's about how you bring the elements together. It's how you use them to make a comment on something.

Shrek. Love it or hate it, it's a perfect example of what I mean. Take all the elements of fairytales and use them to make a statement, taking a lot of otehr things along the way. It's Intertextuality and I doubt there's much left that not going to be Intertextual in some way. Borrowing things form other places is how we make sense of it. Story formulas are how we know how to interpret the meanings and messages.

When I was in high school, studying jazz, I spent some time learning the solos of great musicians. These improvised solos are made up of musical "cells", or "motifs" (or "licks"), consisting of a number of notes in a pattern which is then developed, modified, and evolved. When I initially objected to learning them, my teacher helped me to understand that it is those cells that in part define a style of playing, and if you don't know the "vocabulary" of a style you can never improvise within it. (It's what happens when musicians who have a great amount of classical training, but none in other kinds of music, first attempt to branch out - it just feels wrong.) A dixieland lick is going to be different from a blues lick or a bebop lick, and you have to know what belongs to make something sound right. These licks are passed from musician to musician at gigs, in lessons, and at practice, and have been for years. So if everyone in bebop knows Charlie Parker licks, why doesn't it all sound the same? Because of what each player does with it. On a microscopic level, I might take a certain blues lick made of five notes and lengthen one note, change the pitch of another, play the whole thing backwards, or transpose it to a different key, and the way I do that will be my own.

My story owes a lot to Chandler and Gibson and perhaps Adams because I love their writing, but I still feel that it's my own - because it can't be other than what my sensibilities dictate. A writer's collection of filters is what makes them who they are, and perhaps the need for things to be utterly original (i.e. utterly distinct and different from what came before) is misguided.

There are a few artists in history who dramatically broke from what came before, but that's rare - and there's nothing wrong with that. I think of the composer Schoenberg, who devised a system of writing music in our twelve-toned scale that is intended to prevent the composer from writing music that sounds like other music - that removes the concept of genre-based or composer's-experience-based motifs and forces one to create "pure", "absolute" music. The funny thing about it, as mathematical as the process is, is that the music created that way has a great capacity for humanity and emotion - and a lot of it sounds similar...

Anyway - it's not important if it's utterly original - the point is that we respond to it. Read some Joseph Campbell and report back to us... =)