The storyline with one thousand versions

I think what keeps most new writers from starting to write is the fear of writing the same thing that other writers have already written.

 

Even once you’ve taken the plunge and started to write, the biggest fear in the back of your mind is that someone will call you out and say: I’ve read this exact same thing in this other book I just read by this other author. Some new writers take this fear to new limits. I’ve even met some who refuse to read anything new when they are writing because they are afraid that it will have an effect on what they are writing.

 

This fear should be laid to rest. For this post I will take for example the most common of storylines, the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey storyline was popularized by Joseph Campbell in his book, The hero with the thousand faces, published in 1949. Christopher Vogler updated this work in his memo, A Practical Guide to the Hero with the thousand faces, last published in 2007.

 

Both Campbell and Vogler explain that most stories follow the same path. They usually start with some change in the Hero’s world that forces him to leave his normal life. The Hero will resist at first but is eventually convinced he has to leave on his journey. Shortly after the Hero will meet with a mentor who initiates him into the special world he is entering, either by explanations or by training him. As the Hero goes on his journey he makes allies, finds enemies and overcomes tests and obstacles in his way. Eventually the Hero’s journey leads him to his final trial where he overcomes his ordeal, achieving his quest and receiving his reward. He then returns home a changed person from when he set out, sometimes deciding to continue on the path he has been set.

 

I don’t want to go through any particular story part by part to show you how this applies. I think you will easily recognize this plot line from hundreds of movies you have seen from Star Wars to The Matrix to Lord of the Rings.

 

So if almost every story follows the same structure, what hope does a new writer have to write something different from all the stories that came before him? With the millions of novels already written, can a new writer offer something to a genre that it has not been seen before?

 

Yes, they can. First off, a writer can offer an updated story that better connects with a modern generation. If we look at Robert A. Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers and John Scalzi’s excellent Old Man’s War we can see how this works. While Heinlein’s book is a classic most young people would only know it from the increasingly worse movies getting made under the Starship Trooper’s brand. John Scalzi, who acknowledges the influence of Heinlein’s book on his own work, has written a new version of the age old story of a generation going to war. The book’s have a similar storyline in that they are both about someone going to war, but how it happens and when and why are what makes the difference between the two books.

 

In second place while the plots in different genres tend to follow certain formulas, what makes them different, author to author, are the settings and the characters. Let us say you decide to write a post-apocalyptic novel. The first thing you have to do is decide what brought on the apocalypse. It can be nuclear war, aliens, some anomaly that never really gets explained until much later, like in S.M. Stirling’s Dies a fire, or zombies, like in John Ringo’s Black Tide series. What creates the setting is only limited to the author’s imagination as long as he can make it seem logical and within the realm of possibility. The next thing you’d do is create your characters. Your characters would be all yours and would be different from any other authors (if you make them right). The plot for you book might follow a regular formula but the situations you put your characters in, their interactions with each other and your world-building will all come from your imagination.

 

I believe that when someone says a book or movie is boring or predictable, what they really mean is the writers did not make enough effort to differentiate their story from other stories or to offer anything new. Readers don’t mind if the plot is predictable for the genre as long as it’s interesting and fun to read. Everyone who reads a mystery novel knows that there is a twist at the end (if it’s a good mystery). Nobody says “oh that was boring and predictable” if the twist is done well and written in a way that may even surprise the reader. The twist is expected but what the twist is and how it happens are how the author gets to surprise and delight the reader. If there was no twist, then the reader would be bored because what is a mystery without a twist？

 

Having read thousands of books and watched thousands of movies, it’s very rare that I don’t see what kind of plot they are using from the very beginning. What I look for is how it’s done and the characters that do it. That’s what interests me. There’s a new movie version of Agatha Christie’s classic “Murder on the Orient Express” coming out soon. I’ll be watching it, not for the plot which I know, but to see how they interpret the book and how the characters are portrayed and of course to watch Hercules Poirot use his little grey cells.

 

The most important thing for a writer is to use those little grey cells to make his novel fun and interesting for his reader.