Stop telling yourself you have to create something unique, and perhaps you will free yourself to make something good
Last week, I interviewed the journalist, podcaster and author Hattie Crisell about her new book, In Writing. It’s a collection of writing advice and insight from the many people she has interviewed over the years for her podcast, from the sublime (Jon Ronson constantly running out mid-sentence to save baby snapping turtles trying to cross the road to his garden), to the more worrying (Will Storr’s “dark hole” of a study in which he has a blackout curtain closed and even a sticker over his desk lamp so it only glows as faintly as possible for the entirety of the writing day). But the words that struck me most came from the comic book writer and illustrator Tor Freeman, who said: “I’m not going to write an original story, ever.” This was coupled with the journalist and novelist John Lanchester’s comment: “I find it hard to explain the extent to which the idea is not the main thing.”
So there you have it. Ideas and originality are overrated. Hooray! As overrated as brunch, speaking Latin, pore strips, pugs, Formula One, mineral water, striped wallpaper, live music and expensive moisturisers. (That list is mine by the way – maybe even a wholly original thought.) As someone who has written four books and about 174 fortnightly columns, all tangentially connected to questions of pregnancy and parenting, I am of course relieved and delighted at the news that sometimes the idea that doesn’t leave you is better than the idea nobody else has ever had. In the words of Succession creator Jesse Armstrong: “I just keep on being interested in that world.”
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