Why It’s Okay to Have Completely Unoriginal Ideas
By: Andrew Barbot
Tags: Creativity, Career Advice, Writing, Writing Tips, Screenwriting

Original or Bust

When I began writing TV pilots, I put tremendous pressure on myself to come up with completely original ideas. If my premise had even a whiff of being done already, I’d abandoned it. Over the years, I’ve killed countless ideas because I didn’t want my work to be perceived as unoriginal.

Of course, everything has been done before but I ignored that inconvenient fact. Instead, I thought I was the problem. I convinced myself I was just unoriginal and uninspired and nearly gave up writing altogether. I was a derivative hack doomed to life a mimicry.

I’m glad I stuck with TV writing, though, because the longer I’ve been doing it, the more I realized how silly it is to try and come up with “original” ideas.

Nothing New Under the Sun

You are setting an impossible standard for yourself if you are trying to write something 100 percent original. It literally cannot be done. You’d have to leave Earth, go to an alien planet, ingest whatever version of storytelling evolved there, and then return.

Unless you’re Elon Musk or taking mushrooms, that’s probably not going to happen. Instead, consider what comedian Fred Armisen had to say about originality:

The idea that something has been done before I don’t see as a negative thing. That’s been going on forever and I think it’s cool that something has existed before. […]It’s passing things along through the ages, and what’s better than that?

Instead of being frustrated or just throwing up his hands, he simply changed his relationship with originality. The patterns of storytelling haven’t changed and a writer is just a link in a very long chain.

If nothing else, your “unoriginal” idea shows you that you might be on the right track. There’s an audience for your idea or your show. Or maybe there used to be one and your idea resurrects it.

All About the Execution

Execution is where your unoriginal idea becomes original, a point Armisen makes here:

The Beatles were inspired by somebody. And Bill Haley and Chuck Berry were inspired by somebody. It just goes back and back through decades of music. I think it’s a person or a band’s personal take on something that changes it as it goes along, and that’s what I like to do. Everything I’ve ever done was inspired by something else and that’s the fun of it.

There are all kinds of examples of this in TV and movies, too. Armageddon and Deep Impact. The Office and Corporate. Friends and How I Met Your Mother. All these projects share similar, fertile ground. But their creators found new ways to tell the same basic idea.

And when it comes to original execution, you are already ahead of the curve. Because you are you and no one is going to execute an idea the way you do.

Sure, you might share a similar background, tastes or point of view with another creator. But you will make creative decisions that only you could have arrived at. A writer needs to trust in that.

“Not Original Enough”

So what if you get that note? Say thanks and die inside, right? I wouldn’t put that much stock in that note. You never know what people’s tastes will be and you have no control over them. For me, if the worst they can say about an idea is they find it unoriginal then that’s not saying much.

I mean, imagine the first time a publisher read JK Rowling’s manuscript for Harry Potter. Or Star Wars for that matter. Or any Quentin Tarantino movie. There are bits in those works that are pulled directly from their source material. Being unoriginal seems like a savvy career move sometimes.

And what if at the end of the day you just feel like your idea is unoriginal? Put it in your idea treasure chest and move on to something else. You’re not killing the thing. Just pausing. Let it keep marinating in the background. You never know when the right execution will reveal itself.