This fascinated me. All my life I've read: mythology, fairy tales, old story poems, fantasy, classics. I'm a librarian. My writing is informed by every word I've ever read or spoken as an oral storyteller. There's so much material woven into my books even I am unable to disentangle what I heard, read, or spoke at some moment in time from what my imagination has done with it! I used to worry about this all the time, to the point where it shut down my creativity. I was so terrified of accidentally stealing someone else's idea, name, phrase, or character, a thing I would never knowingly do. Then the wave of cultural appropriation washed over us and I was newly terrified that people would say I couldn't use a character from Greek mythology because I'm not Greek. I couldn't use Snow White because Disney did. I couldn't use a character from a fragment of an old tale because the anonymous story teller in the tenth century did!
I wrote anyway, but it was my deepest, darkest secret. Until I slowly started coming out of the closet with books "everyone" said were unsellable, too long, too complicated, and too weird! I can come up with a thousand reasons why I can never make it as a writer and a thousand reasons why I'm not a real writer but a parasite.
In the meantime I've written two books of 150,000 words each and am working on the third to complete the trilogy. And I've stopped worrying so much. I refuse to be politically correct, whatever that means. Political correctness is like trying to pin jello to the wall. The need and joy in writing overcomes all these fears and ideologic posturing. Adding AI concerns to the mix is not useful for me and it wouldn't stop me from doing what I do in any case, so I'm bypassing it at this point!
The writer in me says "Yeah, yeah, I know ... they'll arrest me. They'll sue me. They'll find me and come for me and burn the house down with my book collection (which by itself would condemn me, as it's filled with books many would like to ban) in it. They'll threaten me, hate me, send awful emails, try to deplatform and silence me. What shall we write today?"
This fascinated me. All my life I've read: mythology, fairy tales, old story poems, fantasy, classics. I'm a librarian. My writing is informed by every word I've ever read or spoken as an oral storyteller. There's so much material woven into my books even I am unable to disentangle what I heard, read, or spoke at some moment in time from what my imagination has done with it! I used to worry about this all the time, to the point where it shut down my creativity. I was so terrified of accidentally stealing someone else's idea, name, phrase, or character, a thing I would never knowingly do. Then the wave of cultural appropriation washed over us and I was newly terrified that people would say I couldn't use a character from Greek mythology because I'm not Greek. I couldn't use Snow White because Disney did. I couldn't use a character from a fragment of an old tale because the anonymous story teller in the tenth century did!
I wrote anyway, but it was my deepest, darkest secret. Until I slowly started coming out of the closet with books "everyone" said were unsellable, too long, too complicated, and too weird! I can come up with a thousand reasons why I can never make it as a writer and a thousand reasons why I'm not a real writer but a parasite.
In the meantime I've written two books of 150,000 words each and am working on the third to complete the trilogy. And I've stopped worrying so much. I refuse to be politically correct, whatever that means. Political correctness is like trying to pin jello to the wall. The need and joy in writing overcomes all these fears and ideologic posturing. Adding AI concerns to the mix is not useful for me and it wouldn't stop me from doing what I do in any case, so I'm bypassing it at this point!
The writer in me says "Yeah, yeah, I know ... they'll arrest me. They'll sue me. They'll find me and come for me and burn the house down with my book collection (which by itself would condemn me, as it's filled with books many would like to ban) in it. They'll threaten me, hate me, send awful emails, try to deplatform and silence me. What shall we write today?"