“The most original modern authors are not so because they advance what is new, but simply because they know how to put what they have to say, as if it had never been said before.”
–Goethe
It’s been said there are only 7 basic plots, and it’s up to the writer to tell them in new and original ways. So how do you do that?
By being yourself.
No one else has your life experience in quite the same way you do. Even if you’re best friends with someone you’ve known since you were in diapers, they’re not going to have the same experience you did. The differences may be subtle—your dad worked first shift while theirs worked third shift—but even the smallest differences can have huge impact on the outcome.
My short stories and novels may not be the most original ideas in the world—I write mostly about ghosts and haunted houses, for God’s sake. Try telling THAT story in new and interesting ways—so I have to rely on my own personal life experiences to add flavor to what have the potential to be some really tired stories. I mean, how many chain-rattling, sheet-wearing ghosts, how many doors opening and closing by themselves, how many footsteps down an empty hall can we take?
When I wrote my novel THE THIRD FLOOR, about a family moving into a haunted house in a new town … man, that story could have gone so many different kinds of wrong, could have been the stalest, most uninteresting story ever told. And don’t think I didn’t worry about that the entire time I was writing it.
But I was able to use my personal experience to add flavor to that plot. The house in the story was based on a house I had lived in. Some of the events that occurred were things that I had experienced in that house. And there wasn’t another single person on the planet who had THOSE experiences and could use them in a novel.
The prologue to my novel THE FLIP is the story of how two people met and fell in love. Blah blah blah, we’ve seen it all before, so who cares? But it’s more than just that. The prologue to my novel THE FLIP is a retelling of the story of how my wife and I met and fell in love. I changed the setting and the names, but my own personal life experience provided the backbone to that story. Only one other person in the world could have written that opening, my wife, and even her own personal life experiences would have changed the way the story was told.
I took an old idea—the meet cute, the falling in love—and made it original by making it mine, by making it new.
Ezra Pound said, about originality, “Make it new,” and that’s all we’re doing. We’re taking old stories and telling them in NEW ways. How? By making it your own.
My friend Dave and I have had this discussion, about how sometimes we look at our older stories and realize that our life experiences since writing them would result in a totally different version of that story if we wrote them “now”. And as much as the structure may be the same, the result would be original.
So when you’re working on yet another retread of one of only seven basic plots, remember to add your own personal flavor. This is also the best way to let readers know the writer behind the words. Stephen King doesn’t have to tell people his father walked out on the family when he was a kid, he’s been writing about substitute father figures ever since. That’s his experience and it adds a distinct flavor to his novels.
If you want your work to be ORIGINAL—and what writer doesn’t?—you have to make it YOURS. And the ONLY way to do that is to use YOUR personal experience. There’s only one you, and when you rely on the strength of that, you’re going to be writing stories that leave readers saying “No one else could have written that.” And they’ll be absolutely right.
“The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.”
–Robertson Davies