What a question!

What's original anyway? If you've never come across something before you may see it as being original even if it's as old as the hills and everyone else knows about it. In that sense originality is a very personal experience.

The experienced and the cynical, I find, often lust after originality (who can blame them) more often then not to impress others with their encyclopedic knowledge of all other things. The kind of been there, done that, bought the t-shirt kind of thing which everyone does at one time or another, to assert their seniority, gain credibility, impress, show off, whatever. So in that sense it's more or less a philosophical irrelevance, trivial mind fodder.

What I find really works for me is hitting upon an idea that seems to sum up so many other ideas. Something that sums up an underlying feeling that you've never before been able to put your finger on.

And so very often I find that people, myself included, are not so much drawn to the truly unique, never seen before, phenomena of the original idea, but to something that evokes a memory of something else. The best lines often tend to be ones that you think you've heard before but you haven't.

The piece of work I have currently uploaded tries a number of approaches including cliches. Essentially our entire world, the thoughts we have, the language we use, everything in once sense or another is derived from our experience and the culture we are immersed in. Our ideas the very constructs of self are built from the material that we have to hand. In todays age, that is the media, it's cinema, it's television, it's informercials and billboard signs. So with my work I try and reflect this, consciously bring it to the fore so that I can manipulate and thus express myself on several levels, both conscious and subconscious. By the subconscious I mean that I try and manipulate the focus of the reader, and underline the context of the piece. This stems from my understanding of the theory of memes, of simulacra.

So you shouldn't really strive to be original but always try and be fresh, show the plain and obvious in a different way. Take the world you know and rotate it by 180 degrees. Magnify the microscopic, accentuate the invisible.

Anyway that's just some thoughts I have on the subject.

it isnt the story or the events that are original there are no doubt nunaces which may never have been told before but the emotion and expression that a writer puts into a piece.

The originality, unless it is pure plagarism ( and even that has its own originality) is in the way the writer tells the story.

If you listen to say 20 people , winesses of an accident say, who all saw the same accident each will tell a slightly different story all original in there way but similar in some respects, the skill of the writer is to tke an event or story and make it sound original as Anna has already said 8 original stories and they say only 3 original jokes ( and most modern comedians only know 1 of them)