You’d like to write a fictional story, but don’t know what to write about. As you cast around for ideas, you realize everything’s been written by someone else before you. There’s nothing new under the sun.
The French writer Alfred de Musset expressed your precise feeling in his poem “Rolla,” when he wrote, “I came too late into a world too old.”
Author Robert Glancy said “All the stories in the world have already been told.”
Another author, Anna Quindlen, put it this way: “Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel.”
Library shelves and bookstores teem with books you could have written, but didn’t. Now it’s too late. All plots used. All characters portrayed. All settings explored. All stories written.
Obvious conclusion—you might as well give up. You can’t write anything new, anything original. The infinite number of monkeys clattering on infinite typewriters now rest their arms. Having typed everything, they’re done.
If it’s true for you, it’s true for everyone. Not only have the monkeys finished, all human writers must also be done. The last novels, the last short stories, novellas, and flash fiction pieces must even now be rolling off the printing presses. This year, 2022, must mark the end of fiction. All writers must retire. All publishers must shift to reprinting old stuff.
Any day now, we’ll hear the news about the death of new fiction. It had a good run. We remember it like it was yesterday. Rest in Peace.
Any day now…
Wait a minute. I’m not sensing a slowing of writer output yet. Publishers somehow keep cranking out new titles. Writers somehow keep submitting fresh manuscripts.
Don’t they know it’s over? Haven’t they read the obituary? What’s going on? If everything’s been written already, why are writers still writing? Why are publishers still publishing?
Looking back, we see no error in our logic, no flaw in our reasoning. And yet.
Upon further examination, we missed the end of the Glancy and Quindlen quotes. Robert Glancy went on to say, “…but our stories have not been told from every angle.” Anna Quindlen continued in her speech, “…except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”
Maybe there’s hope for you after all. Maybe all plots, characters, and settings have been exhausted…but not in every combination. Not from every perspective. Not using every mood, tone, or style. Not with every apt metaphor, every well-worded simile. Not with your experiences and passions woven in.
Call the monkeys back to their typewriters. They have more work to do. Much more.
Come to think of it, forget about the monkeys. They’re not the ones with stories to write. You are. An infinite number of stories remain. They’re out there. Your muse whispers them to you and you must obey.
De Musset had it backward. You didn’t come too late into a world too old. You came just in time for the world to read your story.
Your story may well resemble, in certain aspects, others that came before. But since it’s yours, that gives it freshness and originality. Something new under the sun after all.
So write it. Let the world read it. Back to the keyboard you go. And so, also, goes—
Poseidon’s Scribe
