Originality

Being original is a very hard trait to maintain. Weather in life or when it is in writing, It is hard in both because there are so many driving forces behind what happens. When in life, people and the media drive us to do certain things. But in writing we follow others writing in all stages for we learned to write from reading from others.

 As a group writers have worked together to make more exciting and quality pieces of writing. They do this by picking up from what other writers have written and the conventions that they use. This is called intertextuality and as James Porter argues is behind every piece of text. I believe it is possible to have some sort of originality when writing but it is never truly just your own.  For you learned from others writing to build your own. Also nearly every writing style has been done by someone because writing has been around a long time and hardly anyone gets published. So calling yourself original is basically being like Zoolander.

To me intertextuality reminds me a lot of one of my two majors, that major is film. Film and cinema has been around  over over 100 years. People like to think that certain directors are completely original and have these methods are super new. Just as in writing nearly everything isn't just your own. For the conventions of cinema much like writing have been honed over the years. But unlike writing new film techniques will arise more often then in writing. a technique in film that was pretty original at the time was bullet time the slow-motion technique used in the movie The Matrix. After this movie many movies copied this technique and perfected it. All in all artistic work in literature and all types of creative media is a group effort that has spanned through the medians existence which results in taking and reusing other peoples techniques and methods which will change through time.