Originality

 I cribbed the punchline from Mythologies and Re-Rememberings: On the Synchronous Moments of Writing a Novel Molly Aitken Deconstructs the Inspiration for Her Debut, The Island Child, for the sake of brevity but the whole was a wondreful read.

Other people’s stories, myths, plays and poems layer into a writer’s work often without them ever realizing. These works are often the fabric of our own creations. Nothing is completely original. No work of art truly can be. If anything, this is a compliment to the work that has gone before, to the work that hasn’t been forgotten.

These similarities happened to me again and again in the writing of The Island Child and I began to accept and anticipate them. I thought I had chosen the name Oona for my protagonist at random. After nearly a year of writing her, I flicked through a worn copy of Irish folktales and there she was, Una, Queen of the fairies, wife of the High King of Finvarra. This Una was a human stolen away by the immortal king of Tír na nÓg, Ireland’s folk answer to the underworld. She was forced then to be the queen of his fairy court forever, just like Persephone was snatched by Hades, and had to live out an eternity as queen below. Of course, I must’ve heard this story as a child and forgotten it since but I had no recollection of it. It made me realize that much of my inspirations are just stories that are dormant until I dig them out and find the connections.

Writing is full of these kinds of synchronous moments, these re-rememberings. In my experience they aren’t accidents. Stories build and overlap inside us over time until they spill out in a new form.

She did not know at first where the inspiration came from. I had a similar experience a few months back re-reading Ross Lockridge Jr.'s Raintree County. Forty-five years had gone between readings and I shocked myself by what I had retained.