The myth of Originality

I thought about writing about "writers block" today, but my mind got swept up into this topic, as it is wont to do.

I don't believe in originality, and right now, thousands of writers across the globe hate me.

I just don't believe with all the Jungian archtypes in the world, that an Original concept is possible, especially with the numbers that humankind have risen to.

My first thought into this came from the realization, that I have a few stories with heavily common threads between them:

Man finds a violent women tied to something in a desolate area, frees her, and they travel.

In one story, it's a romance novel following a wild pict, and a displaced farmer, trying to get home. In another, she's a ghoulish creature in a post apocalyptic wasteland, and he's basically a henchman sent to find her. In another, he's a mercenary, and she's an imprisoned goddess.

Wildly different stories, but similar concepts. To make matters worse, if you replace "woman" with "Male" you get a Conan story. It's a simple thing really, I read Conan as a child and loved it, it inspired me in ways I'll never fully comprehend. It rears its head in nearly everything I write, just like everything else I've seen, heard, tasted and felt.

Probably one of the least Original artists of all time, is van Goph. Again, thousands of people hate me.

But it's true, he drew what he saw. Not special things, not events that would never happen again, he simply looked at things, and painted them. Why is he considered possibly the greatest painter of all time? Because of one word:

Presentation.

That's the difference between everything in the world, how it is presented. In all the thousands of years of human history, presentation is the only thing that changes.

We love certain things, we have fetishes and weird ways of looking at the world. That's the point of writing, to show the world how we stand where they stand, but we see something else.

"What's the difference between a villain and a Super villain? Presentation!" Megamind.