Creativity in recombination: authors and earthworms

I recently had the pleasure of reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and, unrelatedly, some keen analysis of the "canon" of Star Wars from the perspective of 1979, and, still more unrelatedly, some engaging discussion of the soil of the New World in Charles C. Mann's 1493. It has all reminded me that there is, truly, nothing new under the sun, but you can do amazing things with a blender nonetheless.

Let's talk about The Graveyard Book. It's meant as a children's story, about a boy named Nobody who grows up in a graveyard, is raised by ghosts, and has bildungsromantic adventures with ghouls and other spooky creatures. It felt like a fresh story to me, even though you might not think it has a right to. It is, after all, an unapologetic rehash of Kipling's The Jungle Book. While Kipling's not exactly fresh in my mind, I recognized one chapter that drew thoroughly on Mowgli's encounter with the monkeys (for structure) and on H.P. Lovecraft (for everything else).

But that's Neil Gaiman's shtick. He has spent his life filling his head so full of mythologies and legendaria that he can hardly sneeze without producing a novel combination of archetypes. (Part of) what makes Gaiman so much fun is that he makes no attempt to hide his sources. In a sense, he lets you see how his creativity happened because if you recognize at least some of the elements he's drawing on, you can trace for yourself how he combines them. And that is creativity, or at least a large part of it.

While I'm at it Star Wars, as much as it's praised, deserves more credit than it normally gets for putting new skins on old archetypes. There was no reason for George Lucas et al. to hide the similarities between Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress, The Dam Busters (apparently the origin of the "Death Star Trench Run"), or Buck Rogers. The combination itself was novel enough to be something new.

Essentially, much of what we celebrate as great creativity is the work of earthworms: churning culture's litter of old ideas into a fertile topsoil. Which isn't to belittle it at all--that churning turns used-up stories into fresh ones.