for the OP, if you do it well and great, it would work. I guess you could distract people from the "cliche" factor. Although, I'd think that it would be interesting if the main char. knows his dad's the bad guy, and he still has this tug that he really really wants to get to bad dad and stuff, but main char knows that he *HAS* to stop the bad guy anyway. but that's just me.
maybe that's even more cliched, I wouldn't know, lol.

I don't know; this idea kind of appeals to me. It would take a bit of work to make it sound belivable and stuff, but other than that, I like it.  Does anyone else think this might be too cliche, though?

My friend just said she didn't get why it is that fictional characters are always so eager to find their parents, despite the fact that they are doing just fine without said parents. "Why go looking for trouble from a total stranger? Just live and let live" is her way of looking at it.


As you can probbaly guess, none of her characters have ever felt the slightest need to look for their parents.

Would it be accurate to say that Harry Potter's Voldemort is an anti-Luke, then? "He killed my parents, therefore he is the bad guy".

Actually, that one does seem to be a lot more overused!

Could I get more examples of "done badly"? I've never read Eagorn since a few of my friends hated it so much.

Sorry about the Luke But I'm pretty sure people would go "huh?" if I just typed "*I* am your father...overused?"

Hi, I was just wondering if it is becoming overused and cliched to have the villian of a piece be the main character's dad/mom/uncle/grandpa/sister etc etc? (Luke, who's your daddy? ) Or is it pretty much okay? Is it more annoying to have the author string you along for the whole book and then tell you the bad guy is the dad, or is it more annoying to have the fact that baddie is the dad out there in the open around the first or second chapter?

My friend mentioned that making the baddie a relative gives the reader more of a "shock factor", which brings with it a certain amount of emotional impact. I'm not sure I agree with him, as most of the dads-as-baddies are people teh main character has never known.

Anyway, thoughts?

I've got in mind two characters that are brothers, both with the last name of "Jinkins".

One has always been called "Jink" while the other has always be called "Kinsey".

I would say that it's fine, although why not use their first names?

"I've been to see Patrick."
"Patrick Flannigan?"
"Patrick Murphy."
"The one with the mole?"
"Nah, the other one."
"The one that runs the bakery?"
"No, the other ... Look, it's not important. What's important is what I found out."

This is just too confusing for me. I like my character names simple.

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?

I agree on the Mary Sue front...it's just hard to feel sympathy for a character who always always always makes it okay. They don't lose a single hair even though they've killed monsters, saved the world, and blah blah blah. What's the point in caring about someone who clearly isn't having any problems?

(Of course, with series characters, you pretty much know they're going to survive, but even so, they lose friends, limbs, get depressed etc, so there are still stakes involved.)

Thanks too to everyone who contributed on the originality bit. I think I can rest easy now, knowing that it isn't THAT big an issue as I thought it was. 

Hmm...that sounds doable.

Thanks