Dodging the Creative Leech In A Digital Age

As an eighth grader, I hated writing essays, especially the ones that asked me to expound on an archaic social theory, chock full of bizarre ideas, that seem as superfluous in present age as dial-up Internet access. Every take-home essay assignment on a Friday sat sulking in the nook of my study until it was stared at, shoved back under, and hastily brought back to surface on a Sunday evening. That’s when the bells of despair rang. The essay topic was clumsily moulded into a perfectly acceptable five-paragraph structure of cliches, paraphrases and cataclysmic arguments, unfortunately the tepid force of it all failing to rustle even a leaf in the world of literary debates. I didn't see the point of that whole ritual of forced writing. My English teacher, whom I both admired and avoided, rarely marked my assignments with anything other than “Good effort”, “Can do better” or “Work harder”.

And one uninspired weekend, I thought instead of fuming up my brain cells in the pressure cooker of my mind, I’d climb out of my languid mental landscape and find “inspiration” elsewhere. Since it was the pre-internet era, inspiration didn't come easy. I’d have to wear sneakers. I went to a senior’s house who was a Whiz at organizing ideas and making her words seem important and clever. I asked her for her thoughts on the subject of Capitalism vs Socialism. And help she did! She taught me how to draw up a convincing argument, cited examples from the Bible, quoted verses even. It was the best essay I had ever produced, the metaphors so far-reaching and profound. I was pretty damn proud of my work. Of course, it didn’t occur to my underfed ego that it was my friend’s work. Pfff! She just gave me a nudge, so to speak. I chartered that damn path on my own. I submitted my essay with a word of note to the teacher saying that I’d put my heart and soul into this one. As I anxiously waited for my essay to come back, after daydreaming at length about wide appreciation and applause, somewhere I found in myself a scratchy realization. I asked myself, “Would I have co-related examples from the Bible to socialism on my own?” “Is that what I really thought? Socialism trumps capitalism?” I warded off these as writer’s remorse and continued basking in the pre-glow of anticipatory fame. Like a delicate bowel that reveals itself one way or another, my moral compass soon rose above delusions. My essay was returned ungraded with the hissing words, “See Me!”. I knew only too well the indictment that I was up against but had little to prepare for in my defence. The teacher called me to her office, gave me tea and biscuits. I sat there mindlessly, tracing jagged speed bumpers out of cookie crumbs to intercept the zipping motion of my honour.

I don’t recall what I felt at the time or each time when someone looked at my work and said it lacked originality except a jarring pang of shame. I have to say that as a writer who loves reading and one who is rather easily-impressed, I find it difficult to block out the beauty of words that threaten to cling to me with a permanent sticking charm, impossible to unfasten. Maybe some of these words found their way back into form in my writing. If done deliberately, with bonus adjectives and adverbs to masquerade as my own. Maybe, sometimes I had no damn clue what to say and in the process of working out how to get my factory up and running, I looked at what other people have already said. It was funny how much their thoughts resonated with what I wanted to say. And I couldn't help myself but cloak their words in a new robe.

Anyway, with so many people writing these days, the odds of two people saying the same thing had to be in my favour right? I turned to my non-judgemental search engine for an answer. A renowned linguist had already put that theory to test. So get this. Each time you use a word from an existing string of words already written by an author, the odds drop by a fairly large number. So the chances that two people would have unknowingly used the exact string of eight-nine words in a sentence (well unless it’s a popular saying) are fairly low, if not none. Put those words from the two sentences in a similar context, in a similar format and you really are pushing your luck there. If caught, the only thing that’d get you out of that one are the widely-underrated quotation marks. In their absence, you may try the words, “Wow, what an uncanny coincidence!”

I started getting my writings published several years ago. In my writing stint with a magazine, I was given a starting prompt, guidelines on how to cite sources of my findings, quote important people, gather data, ask questions… My first writing test involved, as one of the five key skills I was expected to be armed with, looking at a passage and paraphrasing it. It made me think, “ So what I am really doing is borrowing words from various intellectual pools and structuring them.” I felt a little cheated, kind of like being stripped off my own creative capacity. And that river of reinvented and recycled thoughts continued to pull me under when I started writing for myself. Instead of sitting and staring at my blank screen, I opened another tab. It was intoxicating.

Until one day, I just stopped. It wasn't because my moral compass was pointing due North. I found myself getting confused and intimidated by other people’s writing. Instead, I read books, enjoying the light breeziness of flowery prose in that moment without highlighting them for days when I run short of inspiration. I sat in a quaint, no-wifi cafe with my laptop, with only dull murmurs and the smell of hazelnut latte as my creative fuel, staring at my blank screen, not knowing which direction I’d run in my labyrinth of thoughts, whether I’d move ever at all. I rose to the challenge of finding myself in my words, even though they were not half as alluring as those of my writer idols.

Sometimes on Medium, I stumble upon a story or a poem like mine and I wonder, “How did that ever happen?” What are the chances that two obscure unconnected writers would find the same, seemingly original idea to write about nearly around the same time, especially when the inception of the idea is not based on the current state of affairs? It is then that I think there are greater cosmic forces at work. The world around us is both our writing pad and our writing prompt. And we’re probably connected in more ways than the wide tangles of the internet. For me, as someone who has previously stolen other people’s thoughts to define my own, there is but one thing that defines the delicate line between plagiarism and originality.

It is the scathing voice you hear after you have finished publishing your work.

Well, here’s to hoping that in the wide world of me-toos and already-done-thats, one day, my own work will shine through. Untainted.