McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Originality--How important is it?

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Der Sturmbrecher:
If you're trying to be original, yes, it's kind of important. If you're just trying to write something entertaining, not especially.

Ultimately, most stories are about the same thing: how characters react to situations. You can merge them with great settings, cool mechanics (Butcher magic rocks!), and whatever good idea you want, but if the characters are dislikeable or just boring, the whole thing becomes that way. Think about all the genres of fantasy out there. Take Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling, Jim Butcher, and J. R. R. Tolkien. All of them are widely regarded as great authors. Despite all their nice gimmicks, though, it's the characters which make the stories worth telling. Substitute a bunch of nameless mannequins into LOTR, and nobody cares about it. Take Terry Pratchett's narrative and voices away, and you have some mildly entertaining fairy tales. Stripped down, the stories are the same: protagonist faces problem. Protagonist meets supporting characters. Protagonist and Supporting characters fight evil antagonist.

What you need to make a story riveting varies. With some writers it's their voices. With others it's their humor. With still others it's characters, philosophy, you name it. That isn't to say that elements like setting, mechanics and other aren't important though. I wouldn't be half as interested in the Dresden Files if they weren't the magical mysteries they are. But if that's all they were, they wouldn't be enough either.

So for your story(ies), you need to figure what it is you can do which makes it interesting. Write experimentally, and see what other people think. They're you're target audience after all.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Der Sturmbrecher on June 10, 2010, 08:19:36 PM ---If you're trying to be original, yes, it's kind of important. If you're just trying to write something entertaining, not especially.

--- End quote ---

It depends. There's a limit to how long the same thing over and over can be enterntaining for many people.


--- Quote --- You can merge them with great settings, cool mechanics (Butcher magic rocks!), and whatever good idea you want, but if the characters are dislikeable or just boring, the whole thing becomes that way.

--- End quote ---

I would suggest Hannibal Lecter as an example of an extremely dislikable character who seems to nonetheless be compelling to readers in bestseller numbers.  Judge Dredd is eminently dislikable in some ways and has been going strong since 1977.


--- Quote ---Stripped down, the stories are the same: protagonist faces problem. Protagonist meets supporting characters. Protagonist and Supporting characters fight evil antagonist.

--- End quote ---

And I am saying that in and of itself is a limited perspective, as I was just positing the other day.  Equally sympathetic characters with different notions of good finding themselves in conflict is a different shape of story, for example, but it works.  Not everything in the Hero's Journey redux.

Der Sturmbrecher:

--- Quote from: neurovore on June 10, 2010, 08:43:35 PM ---It depends. There's a limit to how long the same thing over and over can be enterntaining for many people.

--- End quote ---
I wish my brother had some for music tracks...very true. I suppose I should have worded that better.


--- Quote from: neurovore on June 10, 2010, 08:43:35 PM ---I would suggest Hannibal Lecter as an example of an extremely dislikable character who seems to nonetheless be compelling to readers in bestseller numbers.  Judge Dredd is eminently dislikable in some ways and has been going strong since 1977.

--- End quote ---
That would be an example of an exceptionally interesting character. I wasn't using likeable exclusively in the sense of amiable or palatable.


--- Quote from: neurovore on June 10, 2010, 08:43:35 PM ---And I am saying that in and of itself is a limited perspective, as I was just positing the other day.  Equally sympathetic characters with different notions of good finding themselves in conflict is a different shape of story, for example, but it works.  Not everything in the Hero's Journey redux.


--- End quote ---
I'm not familiar with your other post, but my point was that at their core, all story structures are skeletal. They mean little unless you have a spark to draw you in. For instance, that story you supplied wouldn't interest me if I didn't care for the characters, or if the writing style was bland.

arianne:
If you take Harry Dresden and say, the Anita Blake series, you could probably say that both of these series were about supernatual bounty hunters/detectives (or whatever it is they call people who hunt down supernatural beings nowadays). In fact, a lot of the Dresden reviews talk about how Anita Blake fans will "love this new series etc etc". But the two of them are actually somewhat different in terms of characters, world structure and so on.

I was discussing this with some other people the other day, and one person said that only original fiction was "marketable" (aka bestseller, award winning) fiction. She went so far as to say that only orginal fiction would sell (I said, "what?!!")

As many people who replied to this thread pointed out, it's hard to be completely original when you write. The thing is, how much unoriginal can you do and get away with? For example, it's possible to write a paranormal romance and make it different from other paranormal romances (Twilight and Vampire Academy, for example, are worlds apart), but if I were to write a story about, hmm, a male human who falls in love with both a vampire girl and a werewolf girl, and (guess what?) the werewolf girl and the vampire girl are old enemies...that might really be too much of a Twilight rip-off, don't you think? How much "copying" is too much?

Starbeam:
That wouldn't really be that much of a Twilight ripoffs,s simply because there's been a lot written where the werewolves and vampires are enemies.  And same as with what everyone's been saying, it's all in how you write the story around the basic plot idea.  But if you had a guy fall in love with a vampire who didn't have fangs and/or sparkled in the sun and/or had venom in their veins, then that would be ripping off Twilight.  The originality is all in the details.

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