Call it serendipity, happenstance, a sign from above, fate or karma, but I find it interesting that I wrote yesterday about feeling more like the starfish on the beach than the young man throwing the fish back in the ocean. A day later I'm gathering quotes for my Quotes website and I come across something the Pulitzer-prize-winning author and journalist Anna Quindlen said at a commencement address at Mount Holyoke College in 1999:
Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
It may be true that every story every told has already been told. At least when you break it down to its most basic form. Joseph Campbell broke down stories into about ten different archetypes. All of the thousands upon thousands of books ever written tend to follow one of these archetypes.
Yet, readers like some of the members of my family are always looking for a new book. My wife is a big fan of the fantasy fiction author Tamara Pierce who has been turning out a book about every year for the past thirty years. My wife has eager for every book she turns out.
Each of us, with our different tastes, experiences, and world views has a different story to tell. Instead of looking at all the other books, articles and speeches by others on the subject of life purpose and seeing the same thing being said over and over and over again, I can write what I am writing and recognize that nobody has every written in the same way that I have.
The challenge, of course, will be to figure out how to get what I write into the hands of those who are looking for the world view that I hold. That is the real challenge.
The work I have to do is to produce the best work I can.
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