Hey, I haven’t been around since Wednesday! I’ve broken my blogging juju! Really, for once I actually had some semblance of a personal life at the end of the week. Always a good thing since I sacrifice most of it to write. Granted that won’t happen again in bulk for another two weeks when I go to Monster Mania and then not again until I go on vacation in October. A heavy load for me but not really for anyone else. Eh, what are you going to do? And just to warn you, this week might be a little light since I’m covering for underwriting again. That usually results in a pretty heavy workload and me working over time so I’ll see how that goes. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

As you can guess, I’ve moved on to another agent blog (actually I’ve finished reading all of this one and am now on to another one) by Kristin Nelson and this time she talked about originality in writing. Even though the post is old, I want to say it’s still relevant to her slush pile today. In this post she talked about how writers think that character development is the original aspect to their writing while adhering to the base cliches of storytelling, like a quest in fantasy. Needless to say, I’d like to think everyone knows that character development is not, in any way, the original selling point of anyone’s story. It’s a mandatory aspect of writing that everyone needs to adhere to. Really, I’m not sure how character development can be original. Unless they develop into a bug, but that’s already been done.

The originality lies in the story itself but, and I certainly agree with her, there aren’t any new stories under the sun. Really, there aren’t. There are tropes, basic plot elements and cliches but even breaking down the most original story will result in a pretty basic plot that can be found in other, more “cliche,” works. So how can it ever be original?

It’s all in the storytelling. Since it’s impossible to create a truly original story (right down to its bones), a writer needs to take what they know and put a spin on it that few or no people have done already. A boy on a quest is boring, especially if that boy is a farm boy who doesn’t know that he’s the only person that can save the world. You know, dead horse and all. So what can be done to make it a little more morning fresh? How about reversing the quest? An heir to a kingdom who thinks he’s the only person to save it finds out someone got it wrong in the memo. His quest, told from his POV, is to find the person (lets be gender neutral here) who can save the kingdom and thus his backside.

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