Paul Kivelson- Bio and Original Story Question

Paul Kivelson Bio:

             My name is Paul Kivelson and I grew up in a world of opposites. My dad is a Physics Professor at Stanford University; my mom is an artist. Having been exposed to very different ways of seeing and approaching the world, I have grown to appreciate the value of widely disparate approaches to achieving a fulfilling and productive life. I organize my life around activities that allow me to express my creativity in ways that combine my interests in science, psychology, and literature. However of my interest with literature won out in the end and I became an English major with a creative writing focus. I may love a wide variety of things, but I love stories the most. Nevertheless, I will be the first to admit that I do not love all stories equally. I am a science fiction and fantasy addict. That is not to say I do not love different genera’s, but science fiction and fantasy hold a special place in my heart. Beyond the requirement to complete my major I am taking this class because science fiction and fantasy is a truly narrative driven genera, so this class holds special interest to me.

(A good representation of a fantasy narrative being constructed literally and figuratively)

The Question of Originality in Stories:                

              The question of the originality of stories is an interesting issue that I have considered before. As I said in my bio I am a big fan of science fiction and fantasy and I have often asked myself the question, why within the science fiction and fantasy genera where anything can be written about so much of the genera is called clichéd? When you can literally write about anything the stories are still often accused of sounding similar, more so even then any other genera. Thus, I came to the conclusion that how original a story is, is based on perception and literary troupes.

               If one has never been exposed to a story before, then to them it is new even thought the story may have been reproduced basically verbatim from something that already existed. So then, where does a person’s perception that a story is cliché come from, if they have not read the book before would they then not perceive it as new? I realized that it was not the person’s perspective in whether they had read the book or not, but how they perceived the troupes within the story. The reason that fantasy is called cliché so often is that it has so many troupes. The stories are new, but the troupes are not.

               The hero’s journey is nothing new, it has been written about many times before. However a story about a hacker hero is obviously something more recently in origin. How the audience perceives these troupes reveals how original the audience finds the work. These troupes spring from human nature and are as old as humanity. People have always tried to find themselves and have come of age. The struggles of our ancestors have taken on many forms over the years, but at their heart they are the same core troupes told in different ways, thought different vehicles. The reason being that they are told in different ways with different characters, what drives the troupes may be the same, but the narrative itself is different. Stories can be new for the same reason that each person is different, we all have genetic elements of the previous generation of humanity in us, but we are our own people. That is not so say it not impossible to make a story that is not original.

             If the story is so clogged with the core troupes being delivered in ways they have been before than the troupes and repetition is all the audience can perceive then the story loses its originality. If it is not original in the eyes of the audience it is not original at all because originality is an entirely relative construct. Fantasy novels are often called cliché as I said because the genera has so many troupes, but more than that those troupes have a couple rout delivery methods that people rely on too much for originality to blossom in many works and as such all the reader can perceive is tired unoriginal work. We all have our own perceptions on what constitutes originality; however I believe it takes something away from the beauty of the narrative form to call all works repeats of the past, they are only repeats if the audience perceive them that way.