Your first conscious thought when you wake up is this: You’ve got a lot of stuff to do today. A metric ton of responsibility, a task list that unfurls to the horizon like Santa’s “naughty” list, and step one, the action upon which all the others rely, is getting out of bed.

You try to sit up, but you can’t. So you shift your weight, attempting to roll off your bed and on to the floor, only to realize that no, you haven’t actually, but the effort required to plan such an event has left you drained.

You begin to think that you’ve been paralyzed. So, first thing, you try to wiggle your toes. And they wiggle, slowly. You try to move your finger; it moves.

So. At least you’re not dead.

You open your eyes, and realize that the machinery in your head that controls your eyelids is apparently as creaky and dried-up as an old bicycle chain. You look at the ceiling of your bedroom, noticing that it has turned a dangerous gray color. It should be pitch black. You’ve slept too late.

And you can’t get out of bed. Your body has become an immovable mountain; the rocks at the periphery might be shifted, but the center mass is staying put. You can’t imagine how you’re going to get out of this predicament.

And then you have to pee.

So you get up.

Bleary-eyed and incoherent, you suddenly wonder how comfortable your bathroom floor might be.

After reading a post that asks whether or not writers should also be readers, I got to thinking. (So, good job, you Stuart Evers.) One of the reasons I gave up on writing fiction had a lot to do with the fact that I used to read a lot, and hardly read as much anymore. I became paranoid over the possibility that any great idea (or, even just any idea at all) I might have would not turn out to be an original product of my brain, but rather it might turn out to be someone else’s idea, digested some time in our voracious past, now bubbling up into our lethargic mind. I, who have incorporated so much of the world that I admire into myself — originality seemed a lost cause to me.

Part of the answer seemed to be to stop reading everything I could get my hands on. If you do not observe, you can not emulate, right? Except…

We’re all distinct, unique individuals; but you have to notice that the traffic on the freeway grinds to a halt, predictably, twice a day. Or, that you must shop when many other people shop, otherwise how could the lines at the checkout get so long? Even though the circumstances that brought each of those particular people there at that particular time might be entirely unique.

Don’t worry: I’m not about to attempt to sort out the individual/society question on some tiny little blog in the middle of the Internet nowhere. But it puts a kink in the whole notion of creativity, doesn’t it? I’ve read hundreds of rants, essays, and opinion pieces by young people who basically declare that every story in the world has been told. And, of course, there’s that whole “Man v. et cetera” thing.

Coming, as I do, from a science-fiction and fantasy background, my dreams of original storytelling died almost as they began. It became pretty apparent that original concepts were highly prized and, obviously, difficult to find. Even though, at its best, sci-fi and fantasy give human nature an infinite arena in which to play — you can build any world, you can imagine any alien or fantastic species, you can make any point you wish to make — it turns out that being told what’s possible and actually having the talent to dramatize it are two very separate things.

Literary fiction, on the other hand, can tell the same stories over and over without fear, as long as the methods and the artistry are unique. How many stories of tragic childhoods are on the shelves these days? But, of course, they’re not all the same. Post-apocalyptic fiction has existed since  mankind realized the world, like themselves, must eventually expire; and yet, Cormac McCarthy was able to wring massive success from that tired old premise, because he put it out there so — well, we lack the adjectives to describe what he did, exactly.

It seems impossible, but sometimes I wonder if we’re going to get bored with the products of human imagination. And then I realize that there’s somebody out there, right now, watching Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch for the thousandth time, and still laughing his ass off. And also, as time goes by the world changes a little bit, every day, and we make up stories about those changes. Or we look farther afield than our day to day lives, and read about people who are different than ourselves, and what’s old to them seems new to us.

In such a case, human creativity is like the horizon: no matter how close we think we’re getting, it recedes from us until we’re back where we started. And, of course, having seen all that other stuff in our travels, maybe where we started looks  different, or has changed while we were away.

Or, on the other hand, maybe we just take the old stories and update them to match new places and times we find ourselves in.

Who knows, who knows.

Is Ed Champion the best parodist of internet posts out there? Judge for yourself. (We say yes.)

Updated: We had intended to say, basically, that nobody is better at writing parodies of internet posts than Ed, but we got completely mixed up when we added the parenthetical aside at the end, so the sentiment was accidentally (and incorrectly) reversed. I’m sorry about that, and I feel like an idiot. I’m also whacked-out on pain medication and anti-histamines (I have a sinus infection) — which I realize is no excuse. I’ll take more care with what I’m posting, in future. Sorry, Ed!