Brandon Powell (COME SEE SPRING AWAKENING! #shamelessplug)

The best bio I can think to provide at the moment is the one that comes from the staff bios for the show I'm currently involved with, Spring Awakening. It's my favorite musical of all time (not exaggerating), and I have let it consume me for almost a year now, permitting it in these next few weeks to completely absorb my identity, so much that I am aware of and accepting the tackiness of plugging it in this post...so come see it April 12-13, 18-20 (http://musical.stanford.edu) because it's amazingly fun. Here's the bio:

"Brandon Powell (Producer) often questions how he made the transition from hermitic backstage pit orchestra cellist to guy-who-sends-all-the emails, but he is pretty sure Ram's Head is to blame. He has stage managed The Original Winter One Acts and Execution of Justice, and was an active member of the SLE Players his freshman year, which he promises is a real thing. He sends all his love to his talented cast, stellar staff, loving family, and supportive friends, who have all apparently taught him the value of overused adjectives."


And my response to "Is there such a thing as a new story?":

I feel no remorse in taking the position that there is such a thing as a new story. It may be an idealist, optimistic point of view, no doubt biased by my self-identification as a writer, but I own it. In fact, I find it impossible to believe that there is such a thing as a story that is not new.

This idea may have been planted in me by Stephen Koch (or some other craft writer), but for a while now I have upheld that every story is original if it is original for the writer. Suzanne Collins can be said to have copied Battle Royale with her Hunger Games series, but the similarities between the two do not make Collins’s novels any less new.

One way to examine why, logically, there cannot be a story that is not new is to think about context. 

No two writers can write the same story because they are objectively different people leading wholly different lives. They have different motives, different experiences, and different attitudes toward writing.

No writer can himself write two of the same story, because he will have had to have written them at different times. Even if he is writing two stories concurrently, or one directly after another, his life will have progressed between the two stories, or even throughout the day when he may switch between writing one story or another. The stories he writes cannot escape this difference, as they will inevitably reek of everything from their daily emotions to their lifelong experiences.

I cannot speak for other writers, but I can certainly say that in my own experience, I have to believe that the stories I write are new with respect to each other, or nothing will get done.

The most narcissistic of examples I can come up with comes from the collection of stories I wrote while studying abroad in the fall. (Everything about that sentence makes me cringe at its pretentiousness, but we’ll move on, ignoring my having used the word “abroad” unironically.)

Basically, I realized early on that every character I wrote was me. It was a collection of stories focused on a single family, with each story from the perspective of a different family member, and every single one of them was me. The mid-fifties mom with depression was me. The twenty-year-old dancer son was me. The stoic great aunt was me. The babbling toddler was me. I couldn’t write anyone but myself, because I could only speak my own words.

Once I came to terms with this (after much self-directed eye rolling and scoffing), I saw the opportunity at hand. If I had to continue writing story after story about me-infused characters, I also had to make each one new for the sake of discovering something new about myself. I learned to push the limits of how I could hear speech and observe action (is that piece of dialogue something I think reasonable for someone to say? do I really think someone can shrug with their cheekbones?), and in doing so I pushed my characters, each further than the next. 

In this way, I have to believe that each story I wrote is original, and that all stories are, in an arguable sense, new.