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.
A quest is a quest is a quest. You know, a rose by any other name and all that jazz. You can’t hide what your story is because even the basest of readers will be able to pick up that yes, it is indeed a boy on a quest story. Now that’s not to say that people don’t like the same old, same old, but don’t think they don’t notice.
Take Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian as another example. It’s Dracula all over again. Yet another tale of Vlad Tempes. Because we haven’t seen a million of those already, right? So what made this one different? For me, personally, the historical aspect of it added into the fact that the vampire was the front and center of the story even though he was only present for a few pages at the end, and vaguely at that. No love story, no crazy assistants eating bugs, none of that. There’s a hint at a sinister force that’s driving the story and driving the need for this information, plus a dive into a rather dark family secret that’s kept in the dark for the great majority of the book. No simpering vampires, no savage vampires, no vapid girls that love them. This one could easily be real and I think the historical aspect to that only adds to it. It’s not so over the top (like The DaVinci Code, for example) that you need to stretch your imagination to believe it and it’s not based on speculation and half truths. The history is real, bonafide in tangible, physical evidence so who’s to say that that dark, undead shadow with fangs isn’t lurking around the corner? No romanticism needed to drive the plot forward.
Is the concept original? Hardly. Is the execution? I think so. The market is inundated with vampire stories. There has to be something that stands out in order for it to be picked up otherwise it’ll be just another vamp piece that only ends up blending into the fray.
Then there is the argument of whether or not a person can be truly original at all. I, being the trace-the-roots type of person I am, say no. Originality doesn’t exist. We can expand on current ideas, make them our own but the age of being truly original, as in coming up with something that hasn’t been done before, is dead and has been for quite some time. Aside from that, it’s impossible to think up something that isn’t already in your scope of knowledge anyway. When you create a monster, it’ll still bear resemblances to animals that you already know about, what with fur and claws and all that fun stuff. When you invent a new society, it’ll be based on the ones you already know, be it mimicking them or reversing them.
People always say think outside the box when doing such a thing is impossible. What’s outside that box is unknown and it’s like that for a reason. We don’t know it and thus can’t comprehend it. But that’s not to say that box isn’t malleable. I like to make mine into a star or perhaps a splat-type figure. It’s working with what you have and doing something different to shape it instead of playing off of what others have already done repeatedly. Imaginations are vast and great, even if there are walls around them, technically speaking. Stretch your brain to think to the very edges that are hardly touched instead of staying in the safety of the shallow end.
So what do you think? Can one be original at all?
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