Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
Of course it's MINE if it is something I created. Inherently mine. A creation just as would be a painting or statue I might create. There is no "begging of the question" at all. It is perfectly self-evident.
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I see. And what about the person who (inadvertently?) gave you an idea that you then worked out? Or what about the person who told you your first draft was crap, forcing you to rewrite it, possibly incorporating some of the critiques? Is your book (or whatever) still "wholly yours"?
Any author "responding to the times" (a la Dickens) will be writing in a certain context, that forced or inspired him to write in a certain way, preferring to give some critiques (of capitalism, anomie and life in the big city) but not others (christian values?), while that might seem hopelessly outdated 50 years later. Or people like Joseph Conrad, who critique colonialism (
Heart of Darkness), but still implicitly representing the natives as stupid (even if he uses this to show how bad the westerners were, he's still typecasting them at the same time). Yes, some authors (or books) suffer from time-boundness more than others, but there is no writing outside the social context. As such, the author is only original insofar as he gives you his take on it, but that might just be a compilation of arguments he's read about in the newspapers, etc.
And today we have experiments with crowdsourcing book-writing, or ghost-writing
autobiographies. The notion of an author as a creative genius is pretty hard to maintain. Sure, he does
something, but everything? Please.
Yet you don't seem to think those "others" deserve any credit whatever..