Original Ideas(NOT!)

How many truly original ideas are out there?  Aren’t most stories just variations of ideas we’ve been batting around for centuries, if not longer?

I know, I know…that hurts.  How can I say there is nothing original?  Well, because humanity has been around quite a while, and we’ve said a lot.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t new ways to tell the same stories, but they’re still mostly the same story, right?  Let’s look at some things we think of as “original”:

The Shining – ghost story and possession

Harry Potter – boy hero saves the world, plus wizards

Star Wars – boy hero saves the universe…plus space wizards

Guns of the South – Bring the Jubilee gets a modern update

Earthclan – mankind goes into space and finds older, more powerful races

World War Z – zombies

Our stories tend to follow predictable patterns.  Either hero finds incredible, overpowering evil and has to protect(the world, family, an orphanage), star-crossed lovers must find each other under incredible odds(one is dying, they’re both dying, lovers from a past life, bad guys get in the way), or savage conflict creates chaos(brutality of war, oppression breaks out and people must be set free, cowboy has to defend the ranch and his woman against outlaws).  A few other basic plotlines are also out there, but most of what we read today are mere variations of stories we’ve been telling each other since we sat around the fire roasting what’s left of a woolly mammoth.

Am I doing this to shit on everything?  No – I’m doing it to say that we can make old ideas new and fresh by adding variation, by putting our own spin on things.  But that’s what we have to do; we have to look at these stories from new angles.  Lazy writers will just slough off old tropes and hope they sell again, while creative ones will find an approach no one has seen before.  That’s what makes storytelling exciting.  It’s not easy, but if we do it right, we get people to think we’ve found something new, even if we’re aware it’s just a classic we’ve cherried out.