No New Ideas

 The other day I was, as I often am, kicking around worldbuilding ideas. I often like to mash together concepts and cultures both real and fictitious to see what comes out, sometimes without even consciously doing so. It's a background process that's always running for me, and a large part of the reason I have more ideas than finished works.

I digress.

I was playing with the idea of carnivorous societies; how to you build a civilization out of a race that can only eat meat? Without the ability to farm for their food, it seemed only natural to me that this society would develop a great veneration of its hunters, as they will bring in the bulk of the food (especially in the case of a stone or early bronze age type setting). Even in a more advanced setting, where farming has been industrialized and so massive herds of slaughter animals are easily raised and processed, hunting might still be considered a sacred rite due to its ancestral importance. So physical prowess will be held in high regard, as the hale and the healthy will make the best hunters.

I came to wonder, then, how this society might view its prey. We, after all, have a tendency to only use select parts of our food, be it animal or plant, and simply discard the rest, so perhaps these people do the same. Alternatively, perhaps they find waste abhorrent and have found uses for every part of their prey; what they cannot just eat they have found other uses for. Maybe they even venerate their prey, performing rituals of thanks to appease the spirits of the slain and show that life has not been spent needlessly.

As I'm turning all these ideas over, I came to realize that none of them... not a single one... was original to me. Sure, I could rearrange them, piecemeal different practices together in potentially unique ways, but even that wasn't likely to create something wholly new. The process drove home something that I knew, logically, but had never fully realized before now:

There are no new ideas.

I often beat myself up over a lack of originality, battle against feelings of inadequacy, but I've put too much pressure on myself. The goal of writing, especially creative writing, shouldn't be to judge something by its newness, but by its creative approach to the old. Across every story that has every been told are the components of every story that every will be told. We, authors and creatives both aspiring and established, are not architects as much as we are gardeners. We harvest ideas from the trees of authors past, then use those seeds to plant trees of our own. And as long as there is joy in the planting, we've done our job well.