While I was in film school, I had a few underclassmen with whom I liked to hang out. I like to think they enjoyed my company too; they certainly did expend a lot of time and effort to make my thesis as fabulous as possible. Anyway, one day I was talking to the two who would eventually become my producer and my cinematographer. The producer had written a script for his freshman final and was bouncing it off of a couple of friends.

Writing is sort of my trade. I hadn’t fully realized it then, but I knew I liked reading and I knew I had a certain talent for scripts. I respectfully asked him to let me take a look, and he (very graciously, as we didn’t know each other terribly well at the time) agreed.

It was a good script, don’t get me wrong. He has a real talent for emotion in particular. But it was missing a little… something. Pizazz. Glitter. Puppies. Je ne sais qua.

The producer and the cinematographer were working together on a separate project over winter break. I had agreed to let them take a look at my apartment and, if it suited their needs, to shoot there. So on the walk over, we started talking about the producer’s script.

I tried to articulate to him my impressions of the story. The emotion was definitely there. I felt for the main character. There was just something missing. I reckoned it to Greek theatre. In Ancient Greece, when you went to see a show, you already knew the story. Oedipus was born to the king of Thebes and prophesized to murder his father and sleep with him mother. Fearing this destiny would come to pass, his father ordered him killed, yadda yadda. The Greeks would have known all this, and they would have known the ending. (Spoilers: Oedipus kills his dad and [bleeps] his mom.) They didn’t go to see Oedipus on stage to learn the ending. They went to see how this director and these actors on this stage would get from Baby Oedipus to Oedipus the King stabbing his eyes out.

I told this story, and the cinematographer unexpectedly chimed in, “Oedipus with Vegetables.” After much confusion and staring at him like he had lobsters crawling out of his ears, he explained that “Oedipus with Vegetables” was a YouTube video of the story of Oedipus told with stop-motion clay vegetables. Featuring some truly inspired dialogue and more than a little adult content, this video proved to be exactly what I needed to make my point.

I will attempt to communicate here, to you, what I was then trying to tell the producer. His plot and story were derivative. Many films these days are accused of being derivative. I’m sure several of you will tell me the exact name of this fellow, but there was once a book critic who accused mystery novelists of being able to produce only seven unique plots, no more. After this point, it was the same story over again and therefore no good. This same critic went on to become a mystery novelist himself and authored something like sixteen (presumably all “unique”) stories.

However, if you think about it, no story is truly unique. We are all human, driven by the same (or at least similar) needs and desires. We have questions to which we want answers, we have other people and things about which we care, and we experience the same emotions. Therefore, following that logic, after the first fill-in-the-blank stories were told, every following story was derivative. George R. R. Martin is derivative, Agatha Christie was derivative, Shakespeare and even the Greeks were derivative.

The point, then, is that it doesn’t matter if your story is “derivative,” that is to say, it’s been done before. What matters is how you tell your story. There are plenty of ways to be unique about a story. Pull a Tarantino and mess with the chronology. (Or do one better and make a new Memento.) Put a modern twist on an old classic, like 10 Things I Hate about You or She’s the Man. Fool people into thinking you’re telling one story and then turn the tables, as in Malice.

Tell whatever story you want, and at the end of the day, tell it however you want to. But if you want it to stand out, consider doing something out of the ordinary. Consider “Oedipus with Vegetables.”