Pluck it From the Sky
"'There all around us,' old Willie said. 'You just reach up and pick them out of the air'."
How to Read Literature Like a Professor--Thomas C. Foster (p. 192)
Foster is referring to the story, the "only story". That perpetual tale of life, death, love, loss, failure, success, hope, and despair to be forever more continued with a pen, paper, and new perspective. I think he is absolutely right: the truth and fiction of writing constantly surrounds us all. Humanity is the common ground all writers share. How frustrating to think the source or sources of the original story components may never be known. Whoever did designed the archetypes was able to implement a structure which never tires nor ceases to lose impact, one that reinvents and recycles with each generation.
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Georgia Speer on Pluck it From the Sky: To Foster’s point of only one
To Foster’s point of only one story, I can see this point very easily. How can any one of us sit down and start writing without someone’s influences on us. We all will react and interpret what we have seen and heard in our lifetime from those who surround us. Just as described in the interlude page 186, “They all take from and in return give to the same story,” this is a continued story that many will take and put their perspective and spin on it. How true as stated though by Foster on page 187, “On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible. Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before.” So knowing that anything we sit down to read or write is not uncharted waters, someone has navigated this area before and we are just sight seers coming through, picking up bits and pieces here and there that we may throw together, which comes into intertextuality, as on page 189, “The basic premise of intertextuality is really pretty simple: everything’s connected. So yes, it is one continued story.
I think it would be naive for anyone to assume otherwise. Once we can acknowledge that and embrace it, it can be use to an advantage in both reading and writing. And I don't think by accepting this, despite harsh cursory deductions which would assume the worst of the proposition, that it obliterates any chance at originality: many elements in life are bound by common affinity, yet remain unique in their own entirety.