Originality

One of the hardest things about being an author today is the expectation of your story being original. Cliches and tropes run rampant, and for some, the use of any of them instantly brings the quality of your story down. How dare you take someone else's idea? they may ask.

In today's world, there is no such thing as originality, and I hate how people are so heavily accused of not being original. There is no story that hasn't been told. Rather than telling an original story, it is important to tell your story in your way. There is a difference between taking others ideas and using them in your way as opposed to blatantly taking others stories. But today we've forgotten what that difference is. We've become so focused on the pieces of stories that we've forgotten to take them as a whole.

An excellent example of this is tvtropes.com. I hate this website. What it says is "Let me take every single piece of this story and tell you why it's a ripoff." That's not a good way of thinking. It's not even a healthy way of thinking. The extent to which these tropes cover every possible situation is ridiculous. It's built entirely upon the concept that using cliches is bad. Here's the thing. Cliches exist for a reason. People keep using them because they keep working. They keep making good stories.

Is it possible to tell a story that is cliched? Of course it is. If your story is nothing but cliches, of course that's a bad thing. But every story has a cliche of some kind. It's unavoidable, no matter how hard you try. Even if you told a story completely devoid of cliches, it probably wouldn't be any good, because it probably wouldn't make any sense. Intentionally avoiding cliches puts you in a very limited position, and forces your story to lead nowhere.

If you've ever heard of the Hero's Journey, you probably know how true this is. Thousands of stories follow its pattern. You could make a Mad Lib using its format, just changing names, and get some of the best selling books and movies of the past fifty years. But that doesn't make any of them bad. Clearly it's a formula that works, has worked, and will probably continue to work for a long time.

It's easy to compare things to those that have come before it. That is not in itself bad. It's when we start judging things because other things are similar to them that it becomes a problem. You can say you personally prefer one similar thing to another, no problems. But to say that one thing is inherently better than another because they are similar and it came first is deeply flawed. I know I've done it, I won't deny that. But I often try to understand the two things before I make that comparison. But I can't always do that, and so I resort to judging by cliches and tropes. But that's no real judgement. It just shows how little I know about the topic.