Borrowing

all stories steal

Greetings from Sequel Country, where this month I’m mapping out some of the more urban regions. As I live in a place where the state religion is Christianity, and those folk are celebrating Easter today, I thought I’d venture down some of the stealthy little alleyways of “borrowing” that surround this charming late-mediaeval church I happened across.

Christianity itself is nowadays understood to have borrowed nearly everything in its foundational story from earlier stories. Its god is copied from Judaism, but Jesus is a version of the 400BC Greek deity Attis (born of a virgin, died and was ressurected by Zeus), though being resurrected after 3 days copies the Sumerian goddess Inanna. The devil, heaven and hell, angels and archangels all came from Zoroastrianism. Communion and the 25 December origin date came from Mithraism. And no religion was complete without a virgin birth story (besides Attis who originated in Turkey, there are Egyptian gods such as Ra and Horus, the Greek Dionysius and Jason, the Roman Romulus and Remus, and some eastern religions such as Hinduism have them too).

Religion, here, is just a topical example. Both written and oral secular storytelling share this tradition of stealing stuff. Folktales and fairytales are full of borrowings from each other, retellings with different details, and sometimes some clever new features to explain how two stories can actually be joined together if you tell them in the right way. This is exactly how Christianity’s texts must have been cobbled together, and those of many other religions too, such as the various Mahayana schools of Buddhism, which strive to reconcile the Buddha’s teaching that there is no unchanging soul with Vedic religions’ ideas about reincarnation (and later, in China, with Taoism as well). It’s almost as if religions are folktales which somebody realised could be given extra authority if you wrote them down. The written-down is Special, somehow, especially when the book is Impressively Old.

(As an aside – and again this is more topical than directly to do with novel/sequel writing – this tendency to have faith in published words is exactly what I think is the alarming problem with the kind of “generative AI” which is big news at the moment. Leaving religion completely out of it, my career in cartography has shown me that many people have an astonishingly blind faith in maps. They think if you can see it on a map, it must be true. But all web maps have errors, and the so-called “satellite view” is often up to 10 years out of date. In reality, all maps are made for someone by someone who chose what to put in and what to leave out, so all maps have a hidden agenda. Plus it’s pretty easy to lie with maps, and getting easier every day. If people put that much faith in maps, they will believe things that have been generated by an AI, and the most convincing examples will be those which get passed around the world the most, gaining authority simply from the numbers of people fooled by them. What’s more, bad actors will learn which kinds of AI output fool the most people. It’s kind of terrifying. But I digress.)

Now of course, Literature Lane is just a wider street where Religion Passage, Fairytale Snicket and Convention Alley come together. Which is to say that syncretism, the bringing together of various existing ideas, is ubiquitous in modern literature. The novel itself is a well-worn convention, telling a story of one person (usually) through some part of their life, forwards in time. A few brave novelists try varying the formula slightly (such as Time’s Arrow in which time goes the other way) but in general that’s the blueprint, and it’s one which continues to be popular even after 60 years of people complaining that attention spans are getting shorter. Whether religious story, fairytaile or novel, they are all stories, and all stories undergo evolution, just like viruses and mammals and every living thing does. Fairytales written down by Giambattista Basile found themselves retold differently by the Brothers Grimm, and then became productised by Disney, and will no doubt reappear in some other form in the future (unless Disney succeed in further changing copyright laws to keep control of their stolen property).

Does all this mean there’s no such a thing as a new story? There is a whole industry of creative writing textbooks dedicated to cataloguing the basic types of story, the idea being that all stories are just variations on a fundamental pattern. My favourite such book is Into The Woods, which argues that stories tend to follow a five-act structure, but there are many other theories; I’ll cover them in more detail in a future column. The title is shared with a Disney movie based on a Sondheim musical based on, yes, a fusion of several well-known fairytales – syncretism in action!

But if novels all have much the same structure as well as constantly reusing the same material for content, how can there be room for anything new? The answer is that there is always room, because the human experience is so diverse, and our inner lives and personalities are so rich with variation, and because the world is changing so fast. Two stories could be set in the exact same house in the twentieth century and if the stories happened 20 years apart, they would be set in a whole different world with different products and expectations and politics and values and professions, leading to different conflicts and interactions, sparking a necessarily different and original story. The permutations of place and personality are endless – even without imagining whole new worlds as SF&F does. I suggest it’s precisely because of this that novels borrow so much that’s familiar, so much that leans of convention and earlier literature that readers are expected to be aware of. Unless you want to explain everything and everyone from scratch, which would make an unreadable novel, you need to borrow everything that isn’t what you want your reader to focus on. I think this is why so many sci-fi aliens are so human, and so many fantasy worlds so superficially similar to mediaeval Europe. It’s not a pathetic lack of imagination, as I used to believe, but the need to avoid forcing the reader to start from scratch.

Besides, what-if questions are just fun. What if someone discovered a library in which all the books showed the different lives she could have had if she had made one choice differently? What if two family members of different ages swapped bodies? What if the protagonist of a famous story about a teenager with supernatural powers, discovered them not as a teenager but as a middle-aged woman? What-if novels show the popularity of borrowing something and then exploring a change in it; obviously borrowing is a fundamental part of that.

So what I’m saying is that all stories borrow, and for good reasons: it’s usually necessary and often fun. And putting together the best bits of several stories can even produce a better story than any of them was individually, more powerful or satisfying or whatever else people want from a good story.

Ah, I seem to have wandered around the narrow alleys for so long I’ve ended up back at the church. It seems to be dedicated to St. Francis de Seles, patron saint of story-telling. Perhaps I’ll go in and see what story they’re telling today. See you next week.