Some believe writers are divine conduits of expression, channeling their unique muse, never producing anything unoriginal. Others believe that writers are more like engineers, creating objects from known components that seem different as a whole from other objects, even if they share the same parts. Whenever somebody suggests a spectrum, the answer always seems to fall in the middle.
No matter what one may write, someone will read it - at the least, the author themselves. Even in this reflexive discourse community, the writer cannot be ‘truly’ ‘original’, unless they devise a lexicon of gobbledegoop that makes sense only to them.
Writing composition is like music composition. There are only so many notes to use; just as Aristotle said there were only a certain number of stories anyone could tell, there are only so many songs one can write. Altering the tempo, structure, instrument composition, and various other elements makes a song seem unique - even if it uses the same four chords as countless other songs.
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