No One is Special (In a Good Way)
This is a topic I’ve wanted to tackle for a while, but took my time with because of how easily miscommunications can happen here. We’re all very used to the entry’s title phrase being lobbed around as a pejorative, being told something isn’t special is meant to be a way to bring it back down with the rest of us, remove any shine from an apple that dares gleam too bright. But here’s the thing: a shared experience isn’t always a bad thing. In writing, it can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, once you realize it’s there.
When I say No One is Special, that isn’t me saying that we aren’t different, or unique, with our own particular traits and talents. It also isn’t me saying no one matters, or that we could all be easily swapped out and the world would keep turning without a blip. What I mean by “No One is Special” is simply that with 7 billion people alive in this very moment and untold more who came before, there is nothing in the world that you are the only one to feel or experience. Regardless of how specific or strange it might feel, there are others out there who have gone through those exact same emotions.
Love, loss, fear, envy, these are universal concepts we all understand. But you know what else is probably on that list for a great deal of us? The incandescent rage you swallow when you see someone jump ahead in a line, playing out entire conversations after you freeze up, checking occasionally to see if you can change stoplights with your mind (still mostly a no for me). The weird shit you do when by yourself, the curiosities and odd notions, the stuff you think you could never tell anyone about because where does one even start explaining how I spent a half hour freestyling a rap opera for my dog? All of that is so much more universal than you can possibly imagine.
For a long time, the prevailing notion of creating fiction was to go wide and generic. Broad characters, sweeping themes, using “everyman” protagonists with as little meat on their bones as possible so that the reader/view/etc could self-insert into them. And truly, with the markets in place at the time, that very well may have been the only way to succeed. However, time always marches on, and with the fragmenting of the media landscape, generic doesn’t have the same steam it once did. Now that there’s hundreds upon thousands of content creators and platforms to view them on, generic has become something of a liability. I can see a default-level sitcom pretty much anywhere, catching my attention takes something special.
It takes, in a word, specificity. The most intriguing works to me at this point are ones not afraid to touch on those odder truths about being human, even when not actually human, digging in on things other properties would have been afraid to touch. I’ve recommended The Good Place ad nauseum but an entire sitcom dedicated to the dissection of ethics and our ideas of them when applied to modern society is exactly the kind of insane shit I’m talking about. That’s the sort of premise that most people might have occur and then immediately dismiss as “Nah, I’d be the only one interested in that.”
Trust me, I know that doubting voice so well it stops in to chat about the weather, but in this case it is wrong. Those aren’t the kinds of ideas you dismiss, they’re the ones you bottle up and set on a shelf to think about, seeing if there’s any legs to potential stories. Removing any assessments of personal favorites or respective quality, I’ve found my projects do their best when I am leaning in to this sort of notions. “What if Urban Fantasy was about a non-violent accountant?” “What if superheroes had to be integrated into an existing society?” “What if the world’s most powerful villain also had to cope with being a dad?” These are not, on paper, slam dunk ideas if you’re coming at it from the “stay generic” kind of methodology. They were ideas that I found fun and wanted to explore, so I did, blindly trusting that I wasn’t the only weirdo out there.
Every story frustration you’ve felt, every time you see a hackneyed trope employed and roll your eyes, every incident where you’ve seen a side-character and thought there’s a way more interesting tale there than what you’re following, you weren’t the only one. There’s just too many of us for that to be the case. So when it comes time to make your own art, remember that feeling. Not being special means lots of others had that same experience, one that you can use to your own device. Subverting expectations, using tropes to trick the audience, even riding the line close enough to achieve proper parody, all of it starts from the trust that other people understand what you’re referencing.
There a lot of synonyms you can use for “special” that still work. “Different, aberrant, strange, unique.” You might notice a lot of those don’t have the kindest of associations, but they all point at the same idea, that the person in question is somehow cut apart from the rest of humanity. But humans are weird, nutballs of creatures, each and every one, and that encompasses a spectrum of ideas and oddities far greater than you can imagine. Believe in your ideas, and in your audience to stay right there with you.
That’s your best shot at making art that actually is something special.