an element of surprise
"Originality," wrote the British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, "is not an attempt to capture attention come what may, or to shock or disturb in order to shut out competition from the world."
Too often, however, this is precisely what writers striving for originality attempt. Scruton continues:
The most original works of art may be genial applications of a well-known vocabulary. . . . What makes them original is not their defiance of the past or their rude assault on settled expectations, but the element of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of a tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable.
In short, when the audience calls something "original," what they really mean is "unexpected." And something can only be unexpected when there's an expectation to subvert. We are surprised only in context. A train whistle in a bathroom is surprising; in a rail depot, not so much.
Many of my clients worry that their book won’t be original enough. But publishers—and the readers they serve—don’t want originality in the sense of desperate attention-seeking or disruption for its own sake. As an acquiring editor, my least favorite phrase in a book proposal was: This will be a book unlike any other. No thanks. I wanted books that were very much like other books I’d enjoyed—with a twist. An improvement, a variation, a fresh angle.
Take productivity books. I still read and benefit from them. David Allen’s Getting Things Done made me more efficient, but it didn’t solve the productivity problem completely or permanently. Today, books build on Allen’s framework, adapting it to the challenges of digital tools and endless distractions—problems Allen wasn’t addressing when he wrote his book over two decades ago. What I have no interest in are productivity books whose authors, out of ignorance, reinvent the wheel Allen built in 2001.
To surprise readers, ground yourself in the expected. Years ago, I decided to publish a story in a literary magazine. Instead of blindly submitting stories, I first went to the library and gathered the latest issue of every magazine in the collection. Then, I studied both the stated submission guidelines—genre, category, etc.—and the unstated ones: the kinds of stories they actually published. As with everything in life, there’s what people say they want and what their behavior proves they do. To get published, I needed to understand both.
Once I had that understanding, my job was to meet their expectations—with a twist. I wrote four stories, mailed them out, and got one published. This wasn’t because I was an exceptional writer of literary fiction; in fact, I never attempted to publish another story. I succeeded because I did the work most aspiring writers don’t: grounding myself in the context so I could deliver something familiar yet fresh.
If you want to stand out, don’t chase originality for its own sake. Instead, learn the landscape, understand the expectations, and then—adroitly—defy them.