"it's been done." Does that stop you?

Similar to my other thread. I think we all admire that are legendary or so iconic their "big idea" is synonim of their work.

Think of wizarding school and you imagine Harry Potter, Elemental powers and you think of avatar, time traveling alien Doctor whoetc. I think that, people that do want to chash in on those ideas aside, if an idea from a work becomes so iconic it becomes impossible to use again without people thinking in that iconic work than yours.

Does that stop you in creating stories?

edited 22nd Dec '14 1:00:50 AM by RPGLegend

I don't think it should.

At this point, an original idea is impossible. Damn near everything has been done.

So all you can do is have unique execution; spinning the tale in a way that puts a new twist on it, and give it new life.

Heeeeeell no. In fact, use it to your advantage.

I've labelled my story as 'Like Fight Club meets The Matrix'. It's an immediate source of insight for the reader: you know the tone's going to be darker humour, split personalities with lots of action and running from government agents of some kind. Hammer those heuristics in as a springboard to leap off of and then explain the differences knowing that you've already given your audience a simple recommendation. "Hey, did you like Fight Club? Awesome! Then you already know you're in your ballpark of tastes!"

Don't reinvent an already well published, neatly written wheel!

edited 21st Dec '14 10:22:52 AM by Tartra

Nope.

No, it doesn't stop me. I often get ideas from iconic works like that and add some others borrowed from anywhere else to create my stories. I think the best ideas and concepts are all hybrids of previous ideas and that in turn can make for very interesting stories. If anything, it encourages me to try it out to see how unique I can make it through blending it with other ideas.

All in the execution.

"There's nothing new under the sun" is a phrase older than Jesus. And, funnily enough, every single person throughout history who has ever uttered it has turned out to be wrong. Ancient peoples never imagined guns. Medieval people never imagined internal combustion engines. Victorian-era people never imagined the Internet, and so on. There are always new ideas, new concepts, new stories and new characters waiting for an imaginative and clever creator to dream them up. If you think there aren't, then you're not trying hard enough.

Okay, that's a little extreme. Obviously there are areas where there really isn't room for innovation. For example, no-one's dreamed up an alternative to protagonists and antagonists, because that concept just works too damned well to be replaced or radically improved. But what I mean is, it's important to always be looking for a chance to be creative. You should never, ever settle for being cliched. That will kill your writing. If just a bit of thought would make your work ten times more compelling, you have no excuse to be thoughtless. You should always strive to make your work as fresh, creative and surprising as it can possibly be.

As an aside, "it's been done" is a stupid, empty, and pointlessly reductive criticism. Just because one story shares elements with another doesn't mean the newer story is doomed for daring to tread the same ground. Someone posted a thread a week or so ago, calling the big reveal scene at the end of The Empire Strikes Back a "cliche", and I spent a lot of words picking apart that notion. At the core of my argument was the fact that the basic concept of "son fights his father", which is critical to the impact of the first duel between Luke and Vader, can be reframed, rearranged and re-contextualised in all sorts of ways and still retain its central conflict.

And, honestly, when someone slaps your work with the "it's been done" label, half the time the work they'll reference as your predecessor will be something you've never even heard of in the first place. In which case, why not just shrug and keep doing your own thing? Preconceptions are the foundation of cliches - why not avoid them entirely, and fill your story with all your own ideas? At worst, you'll be reinventing the wheel, but at least it'll be your wheel when all's said and done.

I actually like having predecessors who came before me with regards to whatever, whether it be a story concept, a character archetype, and so forth. That's free research material there! One can look at it and tap more into it, figure out what someone else did right, did wrong, and all sorts of potential applications there. It's just basic innovation really. Why spend time making endless mistakes & risking it there when you can tap into the vast storehouse of knowledge and wisdom that is the past.

So yeah, no. I rather embrace it and I typically like hearing what others have done as that's research material.

I'll leave this to close out with.◊

Of course not. I think of all the works that I love that have been done before. Hogwarts is not The Unseen University is not Camp Half-Blood even though they might seem awfully similar as a set-up. I love them all equally. (Well, Discworld most of all.)

With something like a school for wizards, well...where does that come from? The ideas of magic as a science (that is, something that must be taught) and that many of us have grown up through the wringer of a standardized institutional education system instead of having private tutors like medieval nobles or Regency era upperclass people. So, a lot of people can relate to the atmosphere that this creates, getting herded around, navigating the unspoken social stratifications, making friends...

Tropes are tropes for a reason, and tropes are not bad. A better question would be...what prevents a trope from becoming a cliché?

One that did stop me once was the idea that fairy tale Snow White is actually kind of a vampire with her black-red-white color scheme, and Prince Charming is kind of a necrophiliac. Neil Gaiman did it perfectly, so once I read that, I stopped bothering to try to write it out. I would never have thought of telling it from the evil queen's point of view with her as a traditional witch. And while Gaiman did write that he hoped people would never be able to read the original fairy tale in the same way again, I was wondering why nobody else had always read it this way. I mean, the vampire color scheme and necrophiliac Prince Charming is right there! Gothic vampire Snow White should be done to death! Why isn't this trope at least as prolific as Alice after Wonderland being stuck in a Victorian-age asylum?

edited 21st Dec '14 9:29:41 PM by Faemonic

It doesn't stop me at all. Not everything's been done before, but there are endless variants you can make on the same basic formula.

In fact, sometimes I DON'T like the fact that my concepts/ideas have never been done before. It means I have no precedent to research, and it's a lot harder to figure out where the story's heading as consequence.

Not really.

As long as I can tackle something differently, it doesn't stop me.

I have to say, I'd be surprised if anyone on this particular writing forum actually said "yes". The nature of TV Tropes encourages against believing that doing something someone else did is bad.

(If anything, I think we've had the opposite problem).

"It's Been Done"

"Yeah, but I'd do it differently."

One of my story ideas is inspired by the premise in The Edge - a couple of people stuck out in the wilderness - but lacks plane crashes, billionaires and bears and replaces them with a day's hike, average people and the unpredictable nature of, well, Nature.

Half the fun is putting your own spin on something.

edited 22nd Dec '14 12:47:54 AM by Wolf1066

"It's not who did it first, it's who did it better." -Boy George on Pete Burns accusing him of copying his signature style

In all seriousness, I think that at some point you exhaust an idea so that you can't get anything new out of it. Or, at least, if no one can think of anything new and end up producing similar things all in a row, then maybe the idea should take a break for a while out of the public eye (so maybe write it later?).

For me? I probably would be stopped if the person's work was so amazing that I was extremely sure I could not top his/her perspective. But that hasn't happened yet (because I haven't really written anything huge anyways), and honestly (depending on the actual work, of course) if the perspective that I had was very different then I would probably try writing it anyway.

Nice topic; have been thinking about this for a while.

edited 6th Jan '15 4:51:19 PM by Coujagkin

Generally, no: It doesn't stop me. What does stop me is if someone executes it better than I could ever hope to, and close enough to what I would have planned. So, kinda the same as what everyone else has said...

I had an idea for a metaphysical creature which fixed time paradoxes by consuming them. The event, and objects associated with the event would become an empty void which would be filled by the regular progress of the timeline. They were called Chronovores, creatures who hunted down and ate time travellers and anything causing a groundhog day loop.

Then I realized the Dr Who universe already have these, and the perdicament began. Do I just keep them as they are or change them?

While the two are, of course, not mutually exclusive, one should, IMO, strive to be good rather than necessarily original. A good story is a good story; an original one is only original once.

While not exactly the same thing, Stephen King had something very similar with the Langoliers even before Doctor Who did it. See how this works?

edited 8th Jan '15 2:37:33 PM by Robbery

Oh! Thank you!

"It's been done" won't stop me. What will stop me is "it's been done to death."

Very important distinction.

Wouldn't stop me. I think it's less important to be original and more important to be unique. Even if you do an idea that's been done multiple times before, nobody will do it the way you will. Ask 20 people to write a story about a knight, a dragon, and a princess, and you'll get 20 different stories.

All I can say is "this."

Living a life has been done before numerous times. Does that stop us ... ?

It doesn't, not really, and I would think that this particular answer is obvious. Just try to live a good life and it won't matter that numerous people had lived before you, it won't make your live worth any less if you don't waste it yourself.

The same is with writing stories. For as long as you can write a story well, it matters not that a similar one had been written before.