A funny thing happened in the comments section recently.
I posted my latest Sunday short story here on The Confusing Middle — a science fiction piece that, as I was writing it, I couldn’t help but feel the long shadows of other, bigger stories looming over my shoulder. You know the feeling. You’re creating something, and the whole time a little voice in the back of your head is whispering, someone already did this better.
A fellow blogger, firewater65, left a comment saying he loved how the story touched on several science fiction franchises. It was a genuinely kind thing to say, and I was grateful for it. But in my response, I did something very Aaron of me: I thanked him while simultaneously undermining the compliment. I admitted that I sometimes worry my short fiction — or honestly anything I write — comes across as derivative of more popular works. I used that word very intentionally, and very negatively.
firewater65 came back with a second comment that I didn’t know I needed to read.
He reminded me, gently and wisely, that there’s nothing wrong with paying homage to the things that influence our own creativity. And then he made a point that’s been rattling around in my head ever since: derivative isn’t the right word for what I was describing. The right word is homage.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And yet somehow that simple reframe changed everything.
Here’s the truth about creativity that I think a lot of us — writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, whoever — forget when we’re deep in the weeds of making something: nothing comes from nowhere.
Every story has a parent. Sometimes it has dozens of them.
If I write a science fiction story, of course it’s going to have the fingerprints of Star Trek all over it. The optimism. The ensemble crew. The sense that humanity, given enough time and enough stars to explore, might actually figure things out. And if it’s a darker science fiction piece? Then Battlestar Galactica is probably somewhere in the DNA — the moral ambiguity, the existential dread, the question of what we’re willing to sacrifice to survive.
If I write fantasy, you’d better believe The Lord of the Rings is haunting every paragraph. The weight of myth. The idea that ordinary people can do extraordinary things if they’re just brave enough to keep walking. And for any story that involves a world built on allegory and wonder for younger readers, C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia are sitting in the corner, nodding along approvingly.
And if I write a female protagonist who is more than capable of handling herself — who is sharp and resilient and refuses to be rescued when she can do perfectly fine on her own — then yes, she is absolutely modeled after Buffy Summers. I make no apologies for that. Joss Whedon (complicated as that legacy now is) gave us a character that fundamentally changed what a hero could look like, and I would be lying if I said that hasn’t seeped into the way I write women.
Is any of that derivative? Or is it homage?
Think about how many creatives have walked so that their successors could run.
George Lucas didn’t invent the hero’s journey. He read Joseph Campbell and built a galaxy around it. Steven Spielberg didn’t invent the blockbuster — he just made Jaws and accidentally created the template. Every superhero film you’ve watched in the last twenty years exists because a couple of guys named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster decided in 1938 that the world needed a man in a cape who stood for something.
Stephen King has said repeatedly that he read everything before he wrote anything. Every horror author working today has to reckon with King’s shadow whether they want to or not. Every fantasy author lives in Tolkien’s world whether they’ve read him or not. Every romantic comedy writer is, consciously or not, working in the tradition of Jane Austen.
That’s not a criticism of any of those writers. That’s just how creativity works.
We absorb. We process. We remix. And then, if we’re lucky and we work hard enough at it, something comes out the other side that feels like ours — even if you can see the seams of everything that went into it.
The influences don’t diminish the work. They build it.
So I’m taking firewater65’s note to heart. The next time I write a short story and catch myself thinking it owes too much to the science fiction I grew up watching or the fantasy novels I’ve dog-eared into oblivion, I’m going to try to stop and call it what it actually is.
Not derivative. Homage.
A thank-you note written in fiction. A way of saying, I loved this thing, and it changed how I see the world, and now it lives in everything I make. There’s no shame in that. There’s actually something beautiful in it — this unbroken chain of influence and inspiration and reinvention that stretches back as far as storytelling itself.
I’m grateful for the reminder.
Which brings me to one last thing: if you’re not already following firewater65’s blog (found at firewatersite), please remedy that immediately. He’s a thoughtful, generous commenter who clearly brings that same energy to his own work. The kind of encouragement he offered in those comments — low-key, specific, and genuinely useful — is exactly the kind of thing that makes the blogging community worth being a part of. Go check out his work and give him a follow. You won’t regret it.
The Confusing Middle 