Well, you're kind of making an *** of yourself right now (not intended as an insult, I do this myself every day), because Lolita is absolutely brilliant, conceptually, which you would have known had you read it
Again, I use the title as a metonym, which is a type of a figure of speech. Maybe you missed the parenthetical. You could contribute to the conversation by responding to the point I make instead of nitpicking the way I make it.
OK fair enough. FYI, you responded before I could implement my edit. Please check it out. My response to you is that part of good writing is the ability to make any idea good. If all ideas are boiled down to a sentence long summary, as you have them in your previous post, there's ample wiggle room to dazzle your reader. The reverse applies as well. I don't care how intricate and unique your idea is. Done poorly, it will suck. If a good novel is defined by how much emotion it instills in you, any idea can do that. If a good novel is defined by how thought provoking it is, any idea can do that. I agree with you that a writer's job is to write well. In my opinion, the story idea is simply a writer's canvas to do his job. If done well, as with Lolita, that story idea and the magic instilled in it become inseparable, but it in poorer hands, that same story idea would have been absolute trash.
Several of my favorite books (i.e. the best rewards of the time I spent reading them) are not written well. They are among my favorites because they introduced me to ideas that only had their magic instilled in them after I spent a lot of time thinking about them, and stretching them in ways that the authors probably never intended, long after finishing reading them. If they are absolute trash, then maybe one man's trash is another man's treasure, and maybe trash can be recycled into something that looks like treasure to everyone. I am actually doing exactly that. That experience has stripped the term "good book" of its usefulness to me, since there are many distinct ways to praise a book, including "worth reading", "written in a mature voice", "clever use of language", "makes the reader laugh", "makes the reader cry", "suspenseful", etc. (By contrast, the term "good movie" is just as useful to me as ever.) And to relate this back to the theme of the thread (not necessarily directed at @123456789), "first book in history to address a given idea" is not a valid praise of a book. It is certainly a reason to commend an author for being not just a writer, but a visionary. But it does not make the book itself worthier of praise than a book that comes along later and executes the same idea in a better style.
Some fan fiction, including Background Pony (my #1 favorite), The Eternal Gift, and My Little Dashie. Also, I am not very fond of the way Lord of the Flies is written (awkward pacing, purple prose, stiff and abrupt dialogue), nor of the way The Metamorphosis is written (way too much exposition of characters' thoughts). But they both serve as vehicles for communicating fascinating and emotionally resonant concepts to me, and as such, they are among my favorites.
Who are you quoting because I never said that? Edit: Daemon said that, how in the world did you get my name in there? Can you please fix that?
A good story isn't just a single idea. They're made of lots and lots of ideas. The central conflict is just one element, there's also character types and all the individual traits that make them up, subplots, the different settings you use, character arcs are all ideas. Even the choice of dialogue, character actions and reactions, similies and metaphors are all ideas. Thousands of ideas. And most won't be unique as stand alone elements. But there's so many combinations that unique and unusual combinations aren't so hard. When ideas are considered cliche it's because a writer has reached a critical mass in using elements together that are very frequently used together. That's my take on the original question anyway.
@daemon - what book is the one about "a woman cursed so no one can form memories of her"? I instantly recognised all the other titles you mention, but not this one, and it sounds very intriguing!
Personally, I think it is stupid to base originality on a quality( conflict) that is known to have a limited variety. That out of the way, I wanted to point out that making a slight variation of an otherwise common story does not make one's work original. If I write a story about a zombie apocalypse, but make my zombies unique by making them have an inherent love for singing and music, does that make my work original? Well, if I turn the story into a semi musical, or make the zombies start up their own New Orleans, where they sing away their troubles, then, yes, maybe. But if the story is the same one we see, despite this "twist," then the quality is superficial. I see this all the time here when people talk about their "unique" ideas. The story is more or less the same. The twists are ultimately inconsequential. The best way to make a work original is to take your "twist," catch, premise, whatever you wanna call it, and run away with it. Lolita is not just a story about a very sophisticated and charming sexual predator who kidnaps a girl. It's a narrative that seduces the readers and sucks them into a magical and perverse world of nymphets, where logic is turned on its head, and by the end, the consequences of this madness feel real and overwhelming, and putting down the book for the last time (in that read) feels like a punch to the gut. It's the feelings instilled that are most unique, rather than the events themselves. That, to me, is the first and best way to achieve originality. Take a premise to its ultimate and logical conclusion in every possible way you can think of, until its almost more than real. A clever and quick way to feign originality is to just take two stories that have not been merged before and merge them. Say, I wanted to do Aladdin in space. Assuming that hasn't been done yet, some might think it's original. I'm not so sure. If the space element is all accessory, then ultimately, still superficial. Vanilla Sky (the Tom Cruise version), which I consider to be a very unique film, is really a combination of Beauty and the Beast and Inception/ the Matrix.WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT The story starts with a rich playboy heir to a company who screws around at work and with women. His sex buddy, Cameron Diaz, (analogous to the witch in Beauty and the Beast) gets jealous when she sees him with a woman he seems to actually really like, Penelope Cruz (analogous to Bell), and a result, takes him off a bridge in her car, disfiguring his face (transferring him into a beast). If this were just a modern day telling of Beauty and the Beast, Penelope Cruz would still fall for him, and that would be the end, except, the story isn't just Beauty and the Beast, it's also Inception/Matrix/ any dream film story you can think of. So, this Bell rejects her Beast, and rich Tom Cruise hires a company to make him live the rest of his life in a dream. I do not consider this combination to be superficial. The bridging of the two stories (Penelope Cruz rejecting him because he's ugly) is unique and important, not superficial. Furthermore, the actual narrative is not told in the order of events as presented above. Rather, the story first plays out like Beauty and the Beast in its entirety. Tom cruise loses his face. Penelope Cruz accepts him anyway. Tom cruises gets his face restored. They live happily ever after. Tom cruise starts imagining her as Cameron Diaz, and then in a fit of insanity kills her. It turns out halfway through the narrative Tom Cruise is actually in prison telling the story. There'are hints dropped throughout that not everything is what it seems, all leading to the penultimate scene where beautiful man Cruz must tell beautiful woman Cruz, goodbye, and while the MC finds liberation, he does not get love, a very different ending than Inception, B and the B, and the Matrix (1), all of which end with them finding love. Add a dream like tone to the narrative, and what you have is something completely original, but the cool thing is, you can get there just by adding two unique stories together, finding a way to bridge them, and then altering the ending and narrative to fit the essence of the combined story. It's not that hard. I'm saying all this because I'm getting tired of reading about all the superficial twists people plan on using in their WIPs -_-
I think if you start out with a character or two and some idea of what you want the story to be about and write from there, you WILL create a story that's unique to you. If you pre-plot it to within an inch of its life, then you are very likely to be reproducing plots that have been done before. Why? Because your character don't have life yet. Once they have life—and they won't until you start writing them—their actions, choices and personality will determine where the story goes. If you just create stock characters to serve your plot, you're very likely to be constructing a story based on other stories you've heard before. This will not always apply, of course, and I'm sure there are many writers out there who can plot this way and still be original. But if you start with believeable characters, get them interacting believably with each other and their environment, then you WILL have a unique product at the end. The problem is, of course ...do publishers actually want a unique product? They all say they do, but then they stifle the process with all the musts and must-nots they require. Don't believe me? Just read the sorts of submissions they ask for. Their requirements are usually pretty strict and narrow. I'd say the only divisions they should be concerned with are: is it a novel or a short story—and is it finished and edited to a high standard. Beyond that, they should just be open enough to look at stories on their own merits, without preconceptions. They never say : send me what you've got, any length, any topic, written in any style. Send me your first 50 pages, WITHOUT a query letter ...just send us your name, address, contact phone number, etc. We will start reading your story. If it grabs us, we'll ask you to send more. If it doesn't, sorry ...it goes in the bin, and you'll get a form letter telling you it doesn't suit us. I don't see that method taking up any more of their time than reading query letters, deciding which stories sound promising, contacting the author, bla de bla de bla. But it would certainly encourage more diversity and would be less likely to allow a really unique product to slip between the rungs.
I wish you'd put spoiler tags... -____-; I suppose it's an incredibly old film though. In any case, now I wanna watch it!!!
Actually, I think Inception was a rip off of a Scrooge McDuck comic book, or so I heard. It was okay, but I felt Dark City was better - a very underrated movie.
Those who are saying there are no new ideas either are only reading books and watching movies with predictability and spoonfed plots or are self-limiting their own imagination and have no faith in themselves to come up with new and original. If you were talking about music that's one thing, but we're talking about stories to tell. Everything possible (or impossible) that could happen has already been told? The answer is simply, no. ~Chad Lutzke
Man vs. man. Man vs. Nature. Man vs. Himself. You can add "Man vs. computer" but it's splitting hairs.
This actually strengthens the analogy if you consider all the things you can do in math that look different, but are really defined by addition and multiplication.
I think you're misunderstanding the idea that there are only a few basic plots. It doesn't mean that everything has already been told. Rather, it means that pretty much everything meaningful to human beings has been told, and told again hundreds of times. (I'm not necessarily defending the idea; I'm just explaining what I think it means.) All humans have the same basic needs and desires. We all follow the same life-cycle: birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, death. We all (well, the vast majority of us) seek to pass our genes (and our accumulated wisdom) on to the next generation. Etc. etc. etc. - see Maslow's hierarchy of needs and other concepts. We require the support and care of our parents when we're young, and later we support and care for our own children. Because we are weak as individuals, we need the support and protection of our tribes, clans, packs, societies, and we can't have that unless we feel empathy for other humans. We learn primarily through empathy - we relate to fictional characters so that we can exercise emotions that are useful to us in real life. Empathy is so important that we consider those without it to be sociopaths. Because of this, we all respond to the same kinds of stories. We need stories to teach us to be human. Being human basically involves the things I mentioned above, so the stories that are most meaningful to us are those that teach us to succeed in our own life cycles - to relate well to those around us, to love and protect and nurture what's important. Sure, there's an infinite variety of possible stories, but we're not interested in the ones that teach us to be electrons or rocks or glaciers or supernovas. We're not really interested in the ones that teach us to be trees or oysters or algae or coral. We're human, we live in human societies, and we need the stories that strengthen our humanity. And that's a pretty small subset of all the stories possible. We have a million stories that celebrate love, but not many that celebrate hate, or even indifference. Hate and indifference don't work for us, so we, as societies, forget those stories. We have a million stories that celebrate heroes vanquishing forces that threaten their societies, because societies need protection; how many stories do we have that celebrate cowardice and failure and the doom of societies? We have stories that deal with those things, but very few that actually celebrate them, because cowardice doesn't support the survival of our societies, and therefore doesn't support our survival. You can go on and on about this kind of thing - things we need are celebrated in our stories, things that threaten us are not. We know that some species are often cannibalistic. Some eat their mates or even, sometimes, their young. We don't tell stories that celebrate that kind of behavior because it's inhuman - it's destructive to us. So, even when we tell stories about animals, we give them human characteristics so that we can relate to them - so that they tell human stories even though they are nominally not human. My point in all this is that when someone says there are only a few plots, what they really mean is that there are only a few plots that matter to us as humans.
@minstrel You're assuming that history is cyclic and that humanity doesn't change. If it does, what matters to us might change also, and so will literature .
Well, I don't know much about history, so I tried to keep things really basic. For literature to change in any significant way from what I talked about, we'd have to evolve into at least a different structure of civilization, and that might mean we'd have to evolve into a different species. Given that literature has only existed for as long as humans have had language, any non-cyclic effect hasn't had time to manifest yet. I could be wrong. I'm way outside my field of expertise here, so this is pretty much speculation on my part. It makes sense to me, but I'm interested in comments from others. Do you think there are only a few basic stories? If so, why? If not, can you give an example of one that does not conform to the basic few, yet is still meaningful to humans?
