How can I find a Vampire story idea that doesn’t sound like Twilight?

Honestly the reason people dislike Twilight is both because it domesticates and fetishizes vampires to the point that they're nearly unrecognizable and because it's also really, really, REALLY bad in so many ways a thousand theses could be written on the subject and still probably not cover everything.

As for Vampire Academy, I don't know anything about it, but really, since I tried to write a story significantly focusing on vampires before, here's my two cents:

Explore the lore, powers and rules, and then look deeper into them for any potential interesting implications you've never seen explored before.

Do they need human blood? If so, think about how they get it, and where they get it from. Consider that a lot of stories have them eating transfusion packs, and then consider that those transfusion packs are a: being taken from places that desperately need them, and b: almost entirely artificial, just a bunch of plasma substitute solution to keep the red blood cells fresh and safely get injected into the bloodstream. Maybe they can't even use that at all. Maybe they need fresh blood. Maybe they have a system of doing it covertly yet as ethically as possible. Think about what that might entail, the kind of network that would require, the sheer potential for corruption or abuse of power.

Can vampires control minds? Think about what a relationship would be like when one partner has the power to do that. Think of the potential trust issues, or the dangers, or how difficult abuses of it would be to prove, and how easily a vampire could either get away with it or be framed depending on the mentality of the culture surrounding them.

How do they keep people from noticing how they don't get older? What network do they have set up for relocation and issuing new identities? Or if you can't think of one, maybe they can't afford to live in the public eye at all. Maybe they have to live underground.

Just dive as deep as you can into your version of a vampire, think of the world your vampires would by necessity create, make sure everything's at least logically consistent and believable, and then see what kinds of ideas that exercise gives you.

 

Don't put those together in one sentence.
Go to the adult section of horror and get some vampire books.

 

Give it a different plot. I never read Vampire Academy, but I can tell you that anytime you write a YA romance in which a mortal falls in love with a non-mortal, people will compare it to Twilight. This can be made original but you're going to have to give it a different spin. You can ditch the romance, but if you really want to write on that, give the relationship between the two character different conflicts.

As far as Vampire Academy goes (I saw the movie but I hated it too much to keep up with it), anytime you put vampires or witches or any other supernatural in a school setting, people will thing Vampire Academy or Harry Potter or Vampire Knight or anything in that vain because it's kind of a trope within itself. However, I don't see why you can have an entirely different premise and plot to set yours apart from everyone else's.

You can have the basic trope: human falls in love with supernatural being, some sort of magic school or school for supernaturals, but if you want yours to be seperate from the others, you have to execute it differently. That's all.

 

I kind of side with Mink in this one. If you are going to do something with vampires redefine them entirely or return them to the dark and fearful macabre that they once were. To add to that write out your overall plot and then remove the idea of a vampire from it and see how much you have damaged the story. If the damage is minimal or not there that you are along the same line of stories as Twilight or one of the five million vampire animes. If the story crumbles then the aspect of a vampire itself is actually useful in this case and you have the opportunity to lay the laws of your story however you see fit.

 

Don't use modern cliches. Find old stories about vampires and take their traits from there. Even just changing up weaknesses and strengths might give you a good result.

 

If you can get hold of a copy Vampires Burial and Death by Paul Barber is a fascinating (if sometimes gruesome) exploration of the bedrocks of real vampire folklore. It will definitely help rid your mind of sparkly romance, that's for sure....

 

Don't use those things.

 

Hello Writing-Community,


How I told you, I must write a vampire story. But I have no idea. Every idea I had sounded like Twilight.

So, I wanna ask you what would you like to read when you got “vampire”, “school” and “teen” as notes. Maybe your idea give me inspiration.

Of course, I make my own plot. Just with you as inspiration. So, please write also whar you don’t like to read.


Bye,

Beehoney

 

Don't you already have a thread on this topic running with this same question?

 

Nope. Now I searching some inspiration

 

Do you want to tell a horror story? A thriller/drama story? A romance story? Any combination thereof?

Do you want vampires to be The Bad Guys? How do humans change when they become vampires?

Do you want them to be superhumanly [strong, fast, durable...]?

Does your world at large know about vampires?

Is there anything you don't like about how the real world works? Could you use a vampire story to show why it doesn't work and why something else would work better?

 

@Simpson17866 I would like to write a YA/Horror vampire story where good and bad vampires exists. They got different powers. There do more than one species exist. Ok, I got dhampire, strigoi and moroi. But my idea was strigoi, etc. is like the word homo (lat. human). For example, I got Moroi/ Strigoi Aswang. If you know what I mean. And that’s why they got different powers. I write after the original mythology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire (in the German version are many different kinds of vampires listed)

 

So, Guys. I find out that the vampire genre is too difficult to me. That’s why I get no idea and every idea I had, sounds like Twilight. Maybe I find another idea

 

Would it work to come up with a basic YA school story that works without vampires, and then see how adding vampires makes the basic story different?

The Beatles made it big by combining different elements from wildly different sources

 

Ah, I miss the 90's when people accused me of ripping off Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Do what Chelsea Quinn Yarbro did when she was planning out her Saint Germain novels. Go through the mythology and the legends, decide what you want to keep and throw away the rest. Become familiar with the Our Vampires Are Different trope.

Maybe give Mavin of the Eventide's videos a gander, since she reviews mainly vampire films.

 

I was working on story that took place after the events of the Marathon Bombing in Boston.

A vampire comes to Revere to convince his lover to return with him to Europe. In spite of living for half a century, his lover refuses to leave the North Shore, believing himself to be secure and safe, even in the age of constant surveillance. Unfortunately it's a lot more complicated because another vampire who lives in Boston makes her living creating new identities for other vampires. The human authorities are tipped off and they believe she is smuggling terrorists into the country. So now it's absolutely essential that vampires get their shit together and run while their identities and what they are is still mostly a secret to the human world.

Our Vampires Are Different

My vampires are immortal. You become one when a vampire either tricks or gives you a copious amount of their own blood, which eventually "turns" you. This process can take up to three days. Vampires are severely allergic to sunlight but they can still eat and drink normal foods, including garlic.

You will not age or suffer from any injury or sickness while you are a vampire. However there's a catch. Becoming a vampire doesn't cure you of any illness or injury you had when you were turned. The woman who makes identities for other vampires was in her seventies when she was turned. She still needs her glasses. But when she fell in love and married her mortal husband, she turned him in an attempt to cure him of his Alzheimer's disease. It doesn't work and many of her nights are spent trying to track him down when he goes wandering.

 

I just made this up for you, but I think it would be a different angle.

In year 1943, German scientists found vampires sleeping in a foreign catacomb and tried to turn them into a weapon. In 1945, the allied soldiers who found the lab released the vampires by thinking that they were innocent civilians. The vampires infected the soldiers with the plasmids that gave them strength and speed.

Back in their home countries, the soldiers became greasers who drove around in cabriolets while trying to pick up women to feed from. They recruited teenagers who would be their foot soldiers, and they ran their organization like a covert operation using their military training.

They found that a specific hair grease blocked the ultra violet rays that burned them. They stored it in their hair and took from it when needed against the sunlight. If the greasers couldn't buy more grease, they would become angry and kill the clerk at the gas station.

A man who was investigating war crimes got caught up with the vampires while getting too close to the truth about what realy happened in the laboratory.

The story can go on into modern time if writing historically becomes too difficult.

 

How about an illuminati group of vampires secretly running the world?

 

In order to create the story, you don't have to start with vampires. First of all, try to pick an interesting situation for the story. Think of stuff that happens in schools, listen to gossip, make stuff up about people. Once you have the story, just make one (or more) of the characters a vampire and there you go - you have a vampire story!

 

If he's trying to avoid overdone concepts, that's only right below the sexy, eternal teenager falls in love with jailbait.

 

That's almost the backdrop to *Blade*, isn't it?

I never liked vampires. There's just something about them that I instinctively hate. Maybe it's the fact that in modern literature they are essentially just highly-fetishised serial killers and most of my life choices have been heavily based around the core principle of 'fighting bad stuff', so seeing that sort of thing played as sexy or exotic is revolting to me on a very personal level...

however

I am also really keen on mythology and folklore, so I'd be more inclined to read a book where the vampire was a more traditional type, like the blood-sucking reanimated corpse of a dead black magic user (ie. the Transylvanian type) or the still-buried corpse of an otherwise innocent person who had fallen victim to a vampire himself and now drains the life force of others from the security of his grave (cf. the Great New England Vampire Panic).

Neither of those would make a good protagonist, though. They'd be more useful as the antagonist in a kind of vampiric whodunnit.

 

I don't specifically have a plot for you, but I do have a suggestion: don't do the "stronger with age" thing. It's a really annoyingly restrictive rule if you want actual vampire fights to be remotely interesting, in that it basically makes vampires' ability to fight other vampires entirely dependent on who has existed the longest, which leaves absolutely no room for growth outside of time skips (and even then they'll never surpass the people who gave them trouble in the past). If you're more into them taking out their enemies with deception and trickery, that can still work, but if you choose to go this route...

...Whatever you do, don't do the traditional vampire government system. I'm talking about the ones seen in stuff like True Blood and Being Human.

Never combine "stronger with age" vampires with underground amoral governments. Trust me, it seems to inevitably devolve into an authoritarian seniority-based pissing contest to see who gets to eat the lion's share of the puppies.

And once the shock factor wears off, that's not only boring, but it also leaves the protagonists all but impotent to even attempt to be decent people or to be on remotely good terms with any non-vampires who are in the know, because they simply can't contest the psychotic, hedonistic orders handed down from the higher-ups. It's incredibly frustrating to the viewer.