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| Image courtesy of Surachai at FreeDigitalPhotos.net. |
Ha. That’s funny.
The truth is that there is no such thing as a 100% original
story.
Think of The Hunger
Games. Great books, right? Really
fresh and original and fun. But…wait a
minute…a lot of life in Panem, particularly the Capitol, is modeled after
ancient Roman history. Ever hear of gladiators—you know, Roman slaves and
dissidents who were forced to fight each other to the death…in games? The
rebellion is loosely modeled on the French revolution. And the love
triangle? Please. There is no such thing as an original love
triangle.
The Hunger Games
trilogy is a really neat, original story, yet it is full of concepts that have
been around for centuries.
What about Harry
Potter? J.K. Rowling was acclaimed
for her fresh, engaging, original stories.
But how original were they, really?
Almost every magical animal (with the exception of a few) was directly
hijacked from ancient myth. The
basilisk? Yeah, it exists in legend. Mandrakes?
Yeah, those exist in legend too. And what about the story line? Pureblood wizards vs. halfbloods, mudbloods,
etc? Based on the ideology of Nazi Germany.
The costumes worn by Death Eaters are based on the Ku Klux Klan white
supremacist group that started in the United States. At the end of the series,
Harry dies and rises from the dead in order to defeat the ultimate evil. That’s a distinctly Christian theme, and
whether Rowling purposely modeled it that way or not, there it is.
How is that completely original? All of that has been done before, in one way
or another.
What about the Percy
Jackson series? Those are original,
right? Um, let’s see…use of Greek
mythology—yeah, no. Those are not 100%
original either.
Twilight isn’t
either. Werewolves and Vampires have
been around forever. And so have love
triangles. And wars between two
diametrically opposed cultures.
And what about books or storylines based on the four
elements of water, fire, earth, and air?
There are lots of those, or
variations on that theme. Nickelodeon’s Avatar:
The Last Airbender is one very popular example. A lot of video games use ‘elemental’ powers. My unfinished story The Tower Key has a variation on that theme.
And let’s not overlook one of the most original, game-changing
books in the 20th Century: The
Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, that’s not original either. Tolkien didn’t invent Dwarves or Elves. A lot of what he wrote was drawn from ancient
European mythology. If you want to read
something really interesting about Tolkien’s fantasy creatures, check out this
blog post at Falling into Mythopoesis.
Even Tolkien’s storyline isn’t totally original. While Tolkien never purposely wrote The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for
anything—he just wanted to tell a story—there are many elements which reflect
Biblical themes. If you read the Silmarillion, you’ll see just how much
he drew from other mythologies.
Outside the fantasy genre, consider Tom Clancy. He wrote awesome, original books—but they
were all drawn from history and modern warfare.
He got all of his ideas from things that had already happened. How is
that original?
What about Harper Lee? To
Kill a Mockingbird was based on actual events. How is that
original?
It’s simply not possible to be 100% original because all
fiction is drawn from life. As people, we all interact with a lot of the
same things. We hear a lot of the same
old legends. The easier communication
between cultures becomes, the more things we share—the more impossible it
becomes to be completely original.
As a Christian, I am convinced that only one person ever was
completely original—God. Everything else we’ve come up with since has
either been a knock-off of His stories or a knock-off of other people’s
stories. If you’re not a Christian, you
still kind of get the point. The only
people who were original were the first homo sapiens, but even they got their
inspiration from nature.
Either way, humans are incapable of being completely
original.
So what the heck do we mean by ‘original’ stories?
Original stories are stories which do not plagiarize other
stories. For example, if I wrote a story
called “Mary Trotter and the Magician’s Rock,” which was about a young girl who
discovers she’s a witch and goes to Pigpimples, a special school for witches
and wizards, that would definitely be considered plagiarism. My butt would quickly wind up in court and I’d
be sued for all I’m worth. (There is an exception for parodies—books which
explicitly make fun of other books—but unless this was a parody, I’d be in
trouble.)
If I wrote a story about a guy named Oedipus who ends up
marrying his mom and then poking out his eyes, and claimed that it was my own original work, that would be plagiarism. However, if I wrote a story about Oedipus and
titled it, “Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex Retold”
that would not be plagiarism, because of a little thing called copyright laws.
Nobody has a copyright to Oedipus Rex,
so as long as you acknowledge that this wasn’t your idea, you’re good. However, since J.K. Rowling has a copyright
to Harry Potter, anything you do with
her works, even if you say it’s a retelling, could not be published for
monetary gain. Unless you want to be
sued, big time.
My Oedipus story wouldn’t be considered original. Unless, I
significantly changed several facts of the story, changed the setting, and put
an original spin on the story. Maybe it’s now a science fiction story that
takes place in space. It’s simply
modeled on, or perhaps inspired by, the story of Oedipus Rex. Suddenly, with a ton of things different, it’s now an ‘original’
story.
Most of the time, what we mean by ‘original’ is a story
which hasn’t been told before in the way
that it’s being told now. And a lot of it also has to do with copyright
laws. Being original isn’t so much about
doing stuff that nobody else has ever done—otherwise, James Patterson would be
a plagiarist hack because of his Witch
and Wizard and Middle School
series. It’s about doing it in a way
that nobody else has ever done it before.
Even then, there are overlaps. Some stories are very cliché, but people like
them because people enjoy that particular cliché. You’ve probably left a movie once or twice
and felt like you saw the exact same movie before.
So, I’d say that there are two types of original stories:
the kind that doesn’t plagiarize anything, and the kind that truly tells a
story in a way that nobody else has ever told it. All original stories need the first one, but
the real shining gems are the ones that also meet the second type.
There are lots of very successful stories that are very
similar to others. While I haven’t read
Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, I
have heard that it is almost exactly like The
Hunger Games. One of those, “exactly the same, only different” type things.
It’s different, so it’s original, but it’s not a revolutionary kind of
original. Maybe it is; not having read it, I can’t say—I’m just basing that on
what I’ve heard.
So, if you’re writing a story and you realize that someone
out there is doing something sorta-kinda similar, don’t freak out. Remember, it’s not necessarily the topic of
the story that matters: it’s the way you
tell it.
Do you find yourself
worrying that your story might not be original? Share any thoughts or questions
in the comments.
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