By Sabyasachi Roy
Writers love declaring originality dead. “Everything worth saying has already been said,” they moan, as if the Muse herself retired early and moved to a quiet villa with no forwarding address.
And maybe it’s true—most “big ideas” are ancient. Love hurts? Shocking. Time passes? Groundbreaking. Death is inconvenient? We’ve been singing that tune since people invented caves big enough to echo. Yet we keep writing. Why? Keep reading….
Take love. Petrarch wrote about love like he was bleeding onto the page with scented ink. Centuries later, Emily Dickinson locked love up in a room, sealed the windows, and wrote, “The heart asks pleasure first.” Same subject, wildly different voices. Readers still swoon over both, not because one invented heartbreak, but because each captured it in their own odd cage of words.
Writers panic when someone tells them their idea “has been done.” Of course it has. Someone probably wrote it on vellum during a famine. Doesn’t matter. We don’t read The Odyssey and skip The Aeneid because, “eh, another hero wanders home.” We read both because Homer sounded like a man yelling from the deck of a doomed ship, and Virgil sounded like he ironed his toga before picking up the pen. Same theme—different tone, different experience.
I once wrote about my grandfather’s hands. How they shook when he peeled fruit. Someone said, “This reminds me of Rilke.” I panicked. I am not Rilke. I barely manage my own grocery list. But when I reread, I realized it was like Rilke—only if Rilke also complained about supermarket apples. Same subject, different flavor. That essay got published. Proof enough for me.
Even so-called “derivative” works can become unique through voice. Take Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. At its core? A family vacation and someone painting. Tolstoy covered domestic life decades earlier. Yet Woolf turned it into a meditation where time melts and thoughts feel like water dripping down the page. Nobody said, “We’ve already got a family story, Virginia, sit down.” They let her twist it until it looked nothing like Tolstoy’s dinner table.
And satire? It thrives on repetition. Swift’s A Modest Proposal isn’t the first rant about politics. It’s just the first one where someone cheerfully suggested eating children. (People remembered that part.) The subject—inequality and indifference—was old even then. The delivery? Fresh enough to make an audience choke on their porridge.
Writers fear they’ll repeat what’s already been written, but repetition is baked into literature. Every sonnet is basically: “You’re beautiful, time is cruel, please don’t die yet.” Yet poets still write them, still find ways to bend those 14 lines into something strange—like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, where it sounds like English had an accident but survived beautifully.
Sometimes it’s angle. Melville didn’t invent “man versus nature.” He just made nature a whale and obsession a job hazard. Readers didn’t say, “We already have sea stories.” They said, “This one smells like salt and madness—hand me a harpoon.”
Even quiet shifts in voice change everything. Compare Chekhov’s “man suffers silently in a field” approach to Beckett’s “two guys suffer loudly by a tree.” Same bleakness, but one whispers, the other shouts nonsense while waiting for someone who never comes. Different tones, same existential sigh.
Here’s what I tell anyone muttering “this has been done”: yes, it has. The world has been mapped, but your compass is crooked in its own way. Say it anyway. Say it crooked. Say it like your tongue doesn’t fit right in your mouth. That slant makes people listen.
Sarcasm break: sure, stop writing, because Euripides already covered “family drama” and Sophocles definitely nailed “tragic endings.” (He didn’t, by the way. His endings were a mess, and we still read them.)
The truth? You could write “Spring arrives” and still make someone weep if you phrase it like “the earth coughs itself green again.” It’s never the idea—it’s the angle, the rhythm, the fingerprints on the words.
So yes, everything has already been said. But not by you. Not in your voice, with your timing, your stubborn metaphors, your strange little way of seeing hands peel fruit. That’s the point. That’s the work.
Note: Everything worth writing, including the text above, got scribbled on a clay tablet by Gilgamesh’s intern, but apparently we’re still here sharpening pencils, because the “what” died 4,000 years ago and the “how” is drinking its coffee.
Bio: Sabyasachi Roy is an academic writer, poet, artist, and photographer. His poetry has appeared in The Broken Spine, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Dicey Brown, The Potomac, and more. He contributes craft essays to Authors Publish and has a cover image in Sanctuary Asia. His oil paintings have been published in The Hooghly Review. You can follow his writing on Substack here.
