Aging & Wisdom Quote by Terri Windling

That “old adage” is less a surrender to literary fatalism than a sly permission slip. Windling invokes the “seven plots” idea the way working artists often do: not as a hard rule, but as a pressure valve. If Shakespeare has already run the table, originality can’t mean inventing a brand-new engine; it has to mean how you tune it, what fuel you use, who you put in the driver’s seat.

The name-drop does double duty. Shakespeare is the cultural yardstick everyone recognizes, which lets Windling compress a whole argument about influence into one familiar monument. But it’s also a wink: the reverence is real, yet the gesture is intentionally casual, almost shruggy. That tone matters. It nudges the reader away from anxious gatekeeping (the fetish for “never seen before”) and toward craft, voice, and reinvention.

Subtextually, it’s a defense of retelling as a serious artistic practice. Windling’s broader milieu - contemporary mythic art, fairy-tale revisioning, the afterlives of folklore - thrives on iteration. Stories don’t “belong” to the first teller; they accrue meaning through reuse, through being re-aimed at new fears and new politics. The line also lightly punctures a modern myth: that creativity is a solitary act of genius. Windling positions the artist inside a lineage, where the task isn’t to escape influence but to metabolize it.

Context is everything: a culture obsessed with novelty meets an art world that survives on remix. Windling offers a calm provocation: if the plots are old, your angle can still be urgent.