The Sob Story Template and Other Vicious Circles

I don’t like the phrase, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” I really don’t. I feel like it’s an excuse to limit creativity. Granted, I’m sure said-sun is bored to tears watching Planet Earth make the same decisions since the dawn of time and then think that it has discovered some clandestine secret that the rest of the universe is oblivious to. I can imagine Sun making a tsk, tsk noise while wiping the sweat from his brow, thinking that if we would have just cracked the book of Proverbs, we would have had the answer all along instead of widening our eyes and feeling like the most pretentious little philosophers ever.

How can we ever be individuals if we are told that everything we do or think has been done already? I love my fellow humans, but please - I cherish my identity. I prefer to think that repetitiveness is actually just expounding upon a template. Take Cinderella for example. That story has been done to death. If Drew Barrymore and Hillary Duff think that they are the pioneers of the Prince Charming world, then I hope they suffocate in their pumpkin carriages. But think outside the Cinderella box for a sec - isn’t every love story (or any story for that matter) the basic outline of the underdog heroine rising to challenges she’s been told she couldn’t overcome, and then overcoming them? There is nothing resounding with this scenario; it’s the job of the author to create common ground, to invent personality, to insert emotion, resonance, and forcing me to bury my face in a box of Kleenex by the end of the story, even though I already knew the outcome.

But this excuse has been forced so much that it’s now endorsing ignorance instead of apathy. Fashion trends, for example, are vicious circles. The sixties sported pedal pushers until the seventies conformed them to bell bottoms, and then the eighties morphed everything into tapered jeans. The nineties scoffed all these faux pas in their boot cut jeans, and then when the twenty first century busted capris, skinny jeans, and flares on the scene, society applauds this new discovery in the fashion world.

What do you people think “vintage” means?

This stretches into the literary world as well, which sucks for a girl like me, who is trying to break into the publishing industry. No one wants to publish fiction anymore; the new thing is memoirs. Wow, who invented this new concept? IT’S AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, FOLKS! Now every rape victim and abuse survivor is knocking down the publisher’s doors with their personal version of Cinderella.

Maybe I’ll take Cinderella and change her into a Mermaid and name her Arielle. No, no - she’ll be a beautiful country girl and Prince Charming will be a ferocious beast. Or better yet! I’ll throw her in a beautiful mansion, and toss 20 different men in their and let them vie for her attention and then she can make the final decision herself by voting them off and then giving the winner a rose while I document everything on film and insist that nothing is scripted...