On Being Original - Charlie Butler

Is it possible to steal ideas? When the Harry Potter books started doing well, many people grumpily pointed out that other writers had been writing about schools of wizardry and witchcraft years before J. K. Rowling. Jill Murphy, whose first Worst Witch book came out in 1974 (when Rowling was aged nine), reportedly started to receive letters from young readers complaining that she had pinched her ideas from Harry Potter – which must have been galling indeed. Then there are the witch schools of Diana Wynne Jones and Anthony Horowitz – to say nothing of Eva Ibbotson, whose Secret of Platform 13 (1994) involves a portal to a world of witches, wizards and ogres, located at – yes, King’s Cross Station. Surely that can’t be a coincidence?

Actually, it probably can. The idea of the sorceror’s apprentice goes back a good deal further than Jill Murphy, after all. And train stations are, if you think about it, obvious places to locate portals for travel between worlds. If J.K. Rowling had really wanted to steal an idea from Eva Ibbotson, I think she would have had enough sense to move it to St Pancras, at the very least. 

Having a day job in literary research has taught me not to get overexcited every time I see evidence of some “undeniable influence” or “uncanny similarity.” Nothing is more likely to lead sober academics into making intemperate claims on the Today programme than the conviction that they have “found the key” to a writer’s work in this way. It can be a profoundly intoxicating experience, as I know well – but also one to be treated with great caution. Because, in fact, most coincidences are just that: coincidences.

Terry Pratchett has apparently proposed a fundamental particle called an ideon, which streams through the universe causing writers to come up with the same idea at the same time. I for one believe in it.  What are the chances of two authors publishing a book about a boy called Luke with synaesthesia in the same year, for instance? Yet it happened with Nicola Morgan’s Mondays are Red and Tim Bowler’s Starseeker, both published in 2002. My own The Fetch of Mardy Watt, which concerns a girl who finds that her life is gradually being taken over by a supernatural double, or fetch, had its publication delayed for six months when it was discovered that it was due to be released at the same time as Catherine MacPhail’s Another Me - which, again, involves a girl whose life is taken over by a fetch ( and even features a character called Mrs Watt). That my book about mysterious doubles should have a mysterious double of its own seems weirdly appropriate, but it’s not untypical. Ideons are very common particles.

Now, this isn’t to say that writers are never influenced, consciously or otherwise, by other authors. Of course they are. I’m proud to acknowledge my own influences, from Alan Garner to Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones, to name but three. The sense that I’m working within a tradition that pre-exists me is, far from being something I feel detracts from the value of my writing, part of what underwrites it. As for J. K. Rowling, her books only make sense when placed in the context of the genre of the boarding school story, as well as the many folk stories she draws on and adapts. They are the air that her imagination lives and breathes.

Originality is an overrated virtue – if by originality we mean writing as though unaware of the work of previous authors. Of course, that’s not what originality is really about. But how do you set the desire to do something new against the desire to do justice to the tradition you’re a part of? 

That, as they say, is for another post.