You're Never Going to Be Original! (And Neither Am I)
First, some housekeeping. Today, you’re going to get TWO emails from me. I am sorry about this but please do not UNSUBSCRIBE…
We’re streaming at 7:30 Central — that’s 8:30 Eastern and 5:30 Pacific. Our call-in topic is POSSESSION. As always, you’re free to interpret that however you like. Literal demonic possession. Possessing a lover. The movie. Stealing shit. Whatever it is, I’m open. Tune in here, on Twitch, X, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. You can watch our unedited backlog here.
If you’re going to be a writer, you’re going to have to accept that originality is a meaningless metric. Trust me, I hate it too.
This isn’t just because everything has been said before—though it has—but because we’re not playing an originality game. We’re playing a marketing game.
Two recent Substack posts about plagiarism drive this point home. In “ No one is stealing your trend stories,” Teddy Brown argues that cultural observations exist in the commons, belonging to no single observer. In the other post, Katie Jgln discovered that Maalvika, Substack’s top new bestseller, had appropriated entire passages from her work—down to specific metaphors and italicized emphases.
