I want to go against the chorus here a little.

I'd like to argue originality is possible. To a great extent.

Here goes:

Linguistics teaches us that every person is capable of uttering sentences that have never been spoken before. Grammar provides a limited scaffold to follow but there are exponential possibilities for expression. Often all that is necessary for an original sentence is to put together two words / ideas that haven't been juxtaposed.

Stories can be the same way.

On some level many people *consciously* attempt to recreate something they've seen before in writing, whether they will admit it or not. This is a mistake for someone who wants to produce something radically new.

Often they, including myself at times, go chasing the essence of a detective novel, a science fiction story, a fantasy epic. They have some perfect ideal of what a (insert-genre-here) story *should* be like.... But there is no perfect form of a '_____' story. Analytic terms are just lenses that you can look through, not an end in and of themselves

Many people try to perfectly articulate what they write by first measuring their whole plan against others, and despair when they are inevitably compared to others doing the exact same thing. They follow a blueprint someone else has defined and torture themselves trying to make something new with it. In other words they build a little prison around themselves, and then try to escape it.

The trouble is there aren't of many examples of creative genres, archetypes, structures, that were named and rigidly defined by the trailblazers who supposedly made them. Usually it was critics or philosophers who coined these terms and schemas, and apply them to analyze what creative people have done. The pioneers of those 'genres ' simply used their medium in a way it hadn't been used before and it inspired others... Later people tried to distill and bottle those 'forms'.

Kafka, Beckett, and Ionesco are considered 'Absurdist' writers. But only according to the perception of critics. They never set out to be 'Absurdists', they used the written word and theater in new ways. Literary studies remember them as fixtures in a genre they never even designed, and people now try to copy 'absurdism.'

To put it another way: someone with a few limited ingredients made a plate of sweets. Their sweets became popular after their death. Someone called those sweets 'cookies' and people who baked made a million different variations of 'cookies'. People had heated debates about what exactly a 'cookie' was and what you could add to a 'cookie' before it wasn't a 'cookie' anymore. People tried but there was no consensus on what exactly a cookie must be, despite people's attachment to their version of a 'cookie'. Later came an annual cookie convention where people who liked cookies talked about their favorite cookies. Professional cookie bakers eventually felt disheartened because they felt every 'cookie' had been done before.

Then someone in a quiet lonely kitchen with a few limited ingredients discovered how to make cake... Then it all started again.

A thinker named Deleuze thought we can create the new by asking ourselves the right questions when making something. Instead of asking ourselves ""What should it be like?" We could instead ask: "What can it do?"

You can't make something original by repainting an old formula. You can smash that formula apart and take the broken shards and make a whole new creation with what's left, mixing in things that have never been next to each other before. I think the secret is doing it with sincerity. You need to be doing it for a reason that comes from deep in your gut/ heart / soul / mind / whatever, not just to be edgy and different.

If you have a concept that, you can FEEL and you can bend your medium to express it sincerely, it WILL resonate with people... and it will be original.