A few years back I started a thread just like this on another forum. I had given a few examples of how my seemingly original works were tragically not original after all. Holds true to today, but now I have even more examples! I am apparently very unoriginal in my thinking. One example is of my monsters in the book I'm currently writing. I thought I was being original, but then I was watching youtube and happened across a trailer for the movie "Attack the Block", which showed my monster- aside from the glowing- just as I imagined it in my head. I'm not getting rid of my monsters though, just going to do a little tweaking to make them my own.
No, it's not original. You may have taken commonly used ideas and combined them in a new way, but the ideas are still old. It's just how you fit them together that makes the concept interesting.
I remember when I came up with a title for a book we had done on the new bankruptcy laws (back when I was a legal editor). I called it "No Small Change" and it was quite popular. Another editor said it was not original. I pointed out that it may not be unique, but it was original to me (I hadn't seen it anywhere) and fresh to our audience -- and certainly not copyrighted anywhere. That was all one could ask. I think the question is how you define original. There are probably only a few themes and tropes, but the originality is in the details and the presentation. After all, there are only 26 letters to the alphabet, and only X number of accepted words, so it's the way the author combines them that makes them new and fresh. That and maybe the occasional reversal of expectations.
I wrote a book based on a 19th century lawyer out west, and worked very hard to create a restaurant for a scene -- deliberately patterned in on the old New York restaurant, with the idea that the characters knew it as a copy of the original. A couple years later I was watching old "Gunsmoke" episodes while on the treadmill, and found that Dodge City had the exact same thing. It must have been burned into my deep memory as a child and surfaced as an apparent original idea. A bit depressing, that.
I like to play the what if game. And by asking yourself what if you can take your story in directions that seem original. I would also say that sometimes people think everything has been done but haven't really read enough of what's been done to understand the market. Originality isn't something I worry about. My stories are always original to me. I strive to push the limits with my approach to all types of writing, including creating new wolds and situations that derive from my imagination. That's probably what we all do, but we all do it a little differently. And, boom, right there you have originality.
One may not be able to create a totally original sci-fi story, but they can make fairly innovative associations between certain sci-fi tropes to come up with pretty unique stories.
I'm not positive that everything's been done. A lot of scifi lives in the realm of deep time, but we have no examples of what civilizations actually tend to do in deep time. The 12,000 years that humans have had civilization is a blink of the eye in cosmic terms. There are lots of concepts left to explore for species that have been exploring and evolving for millions or billions of years, we just have to figure out what those are.
Everything has not been done. Go back to the Golden Age. Did everyone have cell phones with the like of Internet access, Twitter, Pinterest, and FB in those stories? Was society altered by that? Were there social media "influencers" for example? So, if the great minds of the Golden Age couldn't foresee those things, why shouldn't we assume that there's unforeseen things in our future too? And that some (but not all) of them will show up in science fiction first? As an inventor on over 50 US Patents (and I don't know how many foreign) I know there's always new things to invent. As a science fiction writer, I'm hoping I can foresee a few of them and the effects they'll have.
We actually had a mini-talk about on another thread about cliches. The problem with trying to be original is that everything kind of already has been done before. Now, if you really thought about it, you could probably come up with a completely original story, but you might have to sacrifice what you originally wanted your story to be to do it. I can't really think of a clean way to say it, but, I think the problem that most people have, when something is done that has already been done, is when it's done poorly, or when it's blatantly done just because it worked the last time.
Improvisational music provides a good analogy for this. You learn to play by listening to and internalizing what other musicians have played on your favorite records, and this comes out in your own playing. There are licks that every guitarist knows and uses, and clichés are everywhere. It's impossible to be truly original with the small parts (unless you're Eddie Van Halen), but when you take them and combine them into a larger solo, it's the unique combination of familiar pieces that makes it original (or not, depending on how combine them). So, I think the extent to which you are perceived as original depends on how skillfully you weave familiar elements into something new.
People keep saying it's all been done because anything new will have similarities to work that already exists. I agree that anything new will have similarities to things that already exist. Heck, every story that's ever been produced uses either words, images, sounds, or a means to stimulate one of the other senses we humans possess to convey a message. To say its all been because there will always be similarities is, I think, a very cynical line of thinking. No, nothing will ever be 100% original because we all use language. If we're writing, we're copying the idea of whoever first wrote a story. That doesn't mean new stories aren't original. I posit that the likelihood that any new story someone writes will almost certainly have some degree of originality to it unless that someone is straight-up copying an existing work. I know I'm being pedantic with this post, but I just think its very defeatist to say "similar things have been done, therefore originality is dead". That's not even touching on the "most humans can't be creative" comments. To me, it's not a matter of whether or not something is completely new, it's a matter of if it's new enough and, most importantly, well done. To be hung up on the degree of originality just gets in the way of what matters.
Has it been done? Define “it.” If you define it broadly, then yes it has been done. If you define it narrowly, which makes more sense in my view, then not by a long shot.
If we are talking one language. English. Then there are only 26 different letters, so their arrangement will be finite. As a story is a collection of finite words....... That's why modern music is so very, very poor. Beethoven used up all the best melodies [/IMG]
It hasn't all been done because we don't know what can be done. However, 1) there have been billions of people having ideas on this planet over thousands of years, so yeah, a completely new thought is going to be hard to come by and b) we base ideas on experience so even new ideas tend to be just an extension of an existing idea so someone will always be able to look back and say it wasn't original. I think the best we can realistically hope for is the reimagining of existing ideas, can you take 1 +2 and make 5 ?
As far as story ideas go, yeah, I think they were all done already centuries ago. The point is to find fascinating and unique ways to do it. Every once in a while a new genre will be created or something, but even that isn't a totally original thing—just a reshuffling of very familiar elements.
If something original can be bad, and something not original can be good, then originality is nothing to worry about too much (unless it’s a deliberate and direct rip off, in which case that’s another thing).
My father told me when I was young once that the ideas I will have will likely already exist inside the minds of others, or have existed. What matters the most is how you act with your ideas. What actions you take based on them. And that you are faster and more successful than your competition. (Sorry for stressing you out.) I sometimes wonder how humans in the future will handle stories and originality. In a billion years, if we are still around, most things will have been examined. From the depths of the oceans, to possibly the most foerign dimensions and universes where the laws of nature look entirely different. Where rain on planets travel upwards and consists of pink droplets that when disturbed turns into a violent gas that travels downwards. Where oceans are in space and consists of purple matter that blinds your eyes. Where life is so strange and exotic that we would have trouble wrapping our heads around it. Almost everything will have been explored. How will we handle stories then? Being bored gods? Is that the time when we will turn to simulations to entertain us and remind us of things past? Or is that the time when we will reset the multiverse? How will we handle a possible near endless multiverse? And who will fight to stop us from resetting it?
The best answer to the question of "Has this been done before?" is never "Yes" or "No." It's always "Perhaps, but not by me (yet)."
Absolutely. I’m not interested who did it first. Zamyatin, Orwell and Huxley write three incredible novels that say similar things based upon similar ideas. All three are brilliant. Even a retelling of an old story can bring something new to it.
@Left What a great post and some interesting feedback from a long dead thread resurrected by @GeoffFromBykerGrove. I’ve had a life long love of all things Sci-Fi and can safely say we are far from all ideas been done. How important is the science?? | Creative Writing Forums - Writing Help, Writing Workshops, & Writing Community The above thread in my replies I talk about the science is just there to underpin the narrative. The focus is the story and the arc the characters move on. Otherwise, it does not work, apart from one example. This would lead to me thinking everything is Shakespeare rehashed. Asimov’s FOUNDATION was based on the rise and fall of the Roman empire. Over the last few months, I’ve started to retro-Sci-Fi re-reading Foundation series, Dune series, Rama and others you all know. Its being an enjoyable experience with somethings becoming dated while others not. The main observation or take-aways are the stories hold up but the technology and protocols don’t. This is profound on many titles written in the late 1990s relying on tech to carry a story instead of underpinning it. Most Sci-Fi relies on humanity coming together to forge an expansion into the uncharted future. Current philosophy and thinking as allowed the individual to have a say/voice with a distrust of control groups. The coming together as a planet for one purpose seems a distant dream. This immediately makes a lot of sci-fi stories non-relatable. Ronald Reagan in 1987 gave a bizarre speech at the UN… “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond,” Reagan proposed. Near future settings have not really produced anything of high quality apart from Harry Turtledove series. The rest is just America saving the day. Scope here in spades… Alastair Reynolds in his Revelation Space series explores interesting concepts of humans separating. Following different paths of evolution and control groups. This is very unusual exploring many different parts of society and belief in the common good. For man to evolve in different ways is fascinating but rarely explored believably. ANN LECKIE 3-part Ancillary series is a modern day must read on an addictive idea. I admit I didn’t like reading the start, but when it got me wow. Its about a space warship manned by humans. The ships AI is self-aware and the captain. It produces avatars to help rely orders. This is all written from the AIs POV and as a female. In fact, ‘her’ descriptions struggle to identify the difference between male and female and its relevance. Trust me as an old white male Leckie blow my mind with her writing style. This is an epic tale told from an unreliable witness in superb fashion. Going back to the OP, there are many tales still to be told. And as I’ve said before, the sci-fi tech part is there to underpin great story telling. Not the other way round… Apologies for ramble MartinM.
