Your Most Original Idea (And How You Came Up With It)

So I have a problem. On and off over the last six months I've been writing down scraps and ideas for the script of a webcomic/zany spec-fic sitcom. Other than that, though, my writing's kinda stalled.

And I'm noticing something about all my notes. The ideas, while fun, are nothing new. A lot of them are based on tropes now reaching dead horse status - zombies are a big one, time travel's in there and the apocalypse figures in a big way (not directly related to the zombies). A lot are just nothing new or particularly interesting, and I think it's because I get most of my inspiration from watching and reading other people's stuff. A few are based on the internet and date so badly that I might hate them the day after I've come up with them.

I'm familiar with nihil nove sub sole, but it's getting to me a bit. So, comrade Troper writers, how do you get around this, and what, in your opinion, is your most original and interesting idea?

Sad to say, my most original idea was one that dated really badly. It was the anthropomorphic personification of sites like Facebook and Twitter (I was wise enough to eliminate 4chan, the results being predictable). Social networking sites with enough users gain a sort of 'spiritual critical mass' and subsequently have avatars in reality. There were a few jokes, but nothing interesting enough to keep that one from getting old quickly.

edited 1st Jun '11 1:25:16 AM by LongJohnnyStrong

I so wish that I could post anything on this but alas, most of my ideas are from other works, although some are more obscure...

Anyone remember the "come up with a character right this very second" thread? I started with an idea from Halloween-themed fanart for Katawa Shoujo, then added elements from Neverwinter Nights, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and a romance novel called Night Magic. The closest to an original idea in the whole thing was an idea so entrenched in my consciousness that I don't even know where I got it from, but when I mixed it all together, the next poster complimented me on my "originality."

In other words, you don't need to be creative. You just need to be eclectic.

(Granted, I can come up with unique ideas. I just need to take several non-unique fictional abilities, then design a magic system that logically allows for them and ties them together. It's a lot more work than most people are willing to put in, though.)

edited 1st Jun '11 1:29:22 AM by feotakahari

My most original idea is probably one of my earlier works. No single element is "original" - fish out of water scenario, trying to find a missing (abducted) person, cyberpunk/dark future, body guards - but the way they are put together makes for a level of originality.

The central protagonist is a cybernetically enhanced bodyguard but instead of a straightforward protection job he's having to function as private investigator to locate his girlfriend's brother and both hide and protect the man's wife while doing so.

As feota said, it's all about being eclectic. There is nothing "new" under the sun (and that was written in the Old Testament) but you can make it "original" in the way you mix things together.

Just gonna echo what the above posters said; mix and matching creates a very good illusion of actual creativity.

Take my current work, which has a 3-4 sided magic system incorporating elements from Harry Potter, Naruto, Forgotten Realms, and Mahou Sensei Negima. It takes me a good 10 minutes to explain it to someone, and everyone mentions how "original" it is, even though it's just a hodgepodge of various elements. (Hodgepodge? I've never used that word in a sentence before... Woo-hoo!)

My point being, most so-called "original ideas" are old ideas given a new twist or combined with some other old idea. Or even just brought back to the surface again after fading into total obscurity.

Ok, so how do you find that mix which makes you go "Yeah, that's exciting"? My problem is that, yeah, I'm aware that all these main ideas are old and that's fine - we still want space operas and post-apocalyptic stories, great. But how do you take your grab-bag of inspirations and pick the ones that look new and shiny?

Take the Space Western. Whoever came up with that needs a medal, combining two of the coolest aesthetics in fiction. And, from here, the combination seems obvious - space is a frontier, the west was a frontier, etc. These days, it's a genre in its own right. To find the next supercombo, we have to combine three or four well-established ideas instead of just two, and we need to take postmodernism into account, being aware of how badly beaten those tropes, or even the parodying of those tropes, are.

I'm just curious as to how you arrived at your perfect mix. Call it a lack of inspiration, but all the ideas I've got cooking are looking too bland to keep me going.

Well, when I was a kid, I thought up a fairly unique dynamic for vampire society - they were all doctors. (I really should revive that fic someday.) As such, they tended to act like obsessive researchers, and when they acted uncaring towards humans it was in a 'poor bedside manner' sort of way (treating you like a specimen of interest rather than a person). They lived scattered throughout several countries, and sent messages to each other (mostly journal article type stuff) by messenger owls (I hadn't seen Harry Potter at this point, by the way).

Another original idea was vampires who, rather than remaining eternally at a certain age, age at a normal rate and then, upon death, transform into a newborn baby and start all over again. Oh, and in that universe many people have bonded animals, and vampires can get as many bonded animals as they have lives (everyone else only gets one).

And my EmotionEaters were pretty original, since I thought of them before I'd ever heard of that trope. They also have white irises as their only physical difference (not Milky White Eyes, the pupil is still dark). And some of them eat brains, which gives them a sort of a MegaManning ability to use skills learnt by the guy they ate.

How I come up with new ideas?

Well, I have awesome lucid dreams, so many ideas come from dreams. The origin of the 'reborn' vampires was a dream about a girl with psychic powers who fakes being a vampire by MindControlling several animals into acting like bonded animals, because 'vampires live multiple lives, so they have multiple bonded animals'. The rest just logically followed. (Oh, and recently I had the idea of doing a changeling story with these vampires, where an elderly vampire sets it up so his infant form gets cared for by unsuspecting human parents.)

Also, several of those came from just following logical chains - for example, vampires are focused on blood, so they'd be able to detect things like diabetes, leading to the idea of them being doctors; or brains are the real seat of your personality rather than the heart or something, so eating brains symbolizes eating the person rather than just their body.

Others came from random possibilities - the white irises came from mentally cataloguing all the colors people's eyes were in real life and fiction, and picking a color I hadn't seen before that I thought looked cool.

I'd like to second what others have said - true creativity is usually not thinking up something no one else has thought of, but combining things in unique ways.

As noted, there is no such thing as true creativity. What you can do is put together two ideas that initially seem unrelated. Sharks and lasers seem to have nothing in common, but when you put them together, the idea of Laser Sharks seems inevitable.

Finding unrelated ideas is simple, the universe is full of them. The trick is to combine them in a way that makes sense.

Example: Idea 1, fairy tale, hero saves princess; Idea 2, spaceships. Think about all the ways that combination could go terribly wrong. Somebody did a decent job of it and came up with Star Wars. So there's hope for any of us.

So you want to Be Original

Come to think of it, I think I had a pretty original idea. It involves a town that believes in a religion that requires them to carry a book of sin, which automatically writes down all the sins they have commited and list the ways to atone for them. If the book is not clear by the time you are destined to death, you will be unable to die until you pay for all your crimes, which is a Fate Worse than Death because it's bloody agonizing. It it become full, you get erased out of existence. The plot kicks in when one man kills an old man, he has his crime written down, but no way to atone for it. So he get kicked out of the village and he travels to found out the way to atone for it.

Actually, my best works are massive builds on or complete rehashes of basic plots other people came up with. For example, Project One Fifty Four is practically my magnum opus, but it originates from the plot of a flash game from Thing-Thing, but it has expanded and changed so much that the only substantial details that remain are two names.

edited 1st Jun '11 9:44:17 AM by annebeeche

In a fantasy mythos of mine that's currently in hibernation, there's a structure called Cratergate. It's a mile-wide, perfect "bowl" in the ground made of a mirror-like material, and at the very center of the bowl is a tall monolith/tower-like structure. Legends say that when all the stars in the sky at that location are in a certain position, they shine down into the bowl and reflect onto the right parts of the tower- opening a portal to Heaven.

Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus."

Don't forget to let them break out.

One approach is to look for Canon Fodder, then rewrite it into an original story. A more broad way of looking at it is to look for good ideas that the original writer neglected or cut off—one idea that I still intend to write someday comes from centering a story around a character who, in the work she came from, captured my imagination in the two pages between her introduction and her death.

I wrote about half a fic based on the idea that, in a certain country, religion was very sore point of contention. So the government banned all other religions and handed everyone an empty book in which to write their own religion, on the basis that if everyone's was different, they couldn't really argue.

It was supposed to be political satire, but I couldn't really make it work without the population being drugged into submission.

I would read that. Sounds like a crazy religious fairytale.

So I was thinking about Avenue Q, specifically, the visual style of how the puppeteers are fully visible and you're just expected to ignore them. Then, I defied the MST3K Mantra, came up with an in-universe explanation for it, and used that to create my antagonist. Then, I tried to see just how much I could ruin my protagonist's life with that antagonist, and built my story around that.

A council of God's sons assassinated God after the World was created, jealous of his power. God's power transferred to all of them, driving them mad with power, causing them to turn onto each other, beginning a massive war in heaven. In order to gain an upper hand against the other sons, the Sons of God occasionally invade the mortal realm to harvest souls for their armies. Like, culling entire worlds. It's pretty damn dark.

Again, I would read that.

My most original idea came from a dream; Big, purple, fuzzy birds who work as police officers for a stormy island town. They can't talk.

2 words: Creepypasta cosmotology.

...I dunno how I came up with it though.

Another one was a fairly recent one, although it may be a bit too archetypal and similar to Shadow Of The Colossus. Hold on...

It involves a domed small nation (about size of Kansas?) that is trapped by a two gigantic statues, one in the east end, another in the western end. In that country, no one can show his/her face to each other because it will curse them. So everyone, even the infants, wear masks.

Everything is fine and all, but there is this dragon which occasionally wanders around town and attacks the towns. It is invulnerable to any weapon available in the country.

One day, a little kid wanders into the forest to collect some berries and meets the dragon when it fell down to the ground after hitting its head on the barrier. The dragon roars at the boy, blowing his mask off of his face. The dragon flies away and the boy comes back to the town, not realizing that he has his mask off. The town becomes shocked that he wasn't curse so thinks that he must be a chosen one and trains him to make him slay the dragon. When the boy becomes old enough, the villagers make a sword out of the piece of the dome that fell.

I don't have any idea what happens in the middle, but it ends with the boy taming the dragon which proceeds to break the statues and destroying the dome.

Too cliched?

edited 1st Jun '11 10:19:08 PM by dRoy

Doesn't sound cliche to me. Dragons are used a lot in fantasy these days, but the domed nation and statues is something completely different.

Dystopian future, where gang wars in Japan are decided by a super powered fashion design contest.

How? That's what I am wondering.(considering making it an RP)

edited 2nd Jun '11 1:57:55 AM by Vyctorian

I once came up with an idea involving an alien invasion around the Cuban Missile Crisis, a breaking of the masquerade of anthropomorphic dragons, a justification for the Adventurer Archaeologist trope, time travel, magic being integrated into technology (guns can hold a lot more bullets thanks to hammerspace, for example), and lots of fantastic racism.

I also don't know where it came from.