In terms of publishable novels, where do you draw the line - and how do you know when you've crossed it?

I've often entertained the thought of writing a novel one day but I've always been frozen by this question. It's impossible to know everything that's been written before you, so how do you make certain that your idea is truly original? Moreover, there are an unending number of novels out there that play to identical fantasy themes - How much can your story parallel others before it crosses the line between influence and plagiarism? What's legal and what isn't?

(Paolini comes to mind, among others.)

I know there are a fair few here who have been published or are in the process of getting a book or two out there...What are your thoughts?

 

It's all been done before. Just do it better.

 

Look at the cliches prevalent in Fanfiction. There are similar ones in the published field, juts usually better written. And just like fanfiction a few shine while others are just dull or good time wasters.

So as Seratin put it, just write it better than most. Or if you could, write excellent characters and try to come up with a dynamic magic system. Wheel of Time and Saga of Recluse come to mind when it comes to original magic systems. But, hey, I think it all comes down to if you can make the book interesting. If so, then many won't care what cliches you are using. Just look at the Santi's work.

 

In my opinion, having a purpose for the cliches/typical genre elements is key.

Let me use fantasy as the example.

Let's say you want to have dragons, dwarves, and kender in your story.

1. Have a reason for them. Maybe you want greed as a theme for your story. Dragons are the quintessential greedy villians in fantasy worlds and dwarves are the same for the good guys. It would be a good way to show a little greyness in the usual black and white morality. The Kender could be there in order to pinpoint exactly what is so bad about greed. The desire to hoard things rather than the desire to get them.

2. Get rid of characteristics that are not necessary to keep the same. Do your Kender have to be the size of children? Do your dwarves have to have beards? Do your dragons have to be dragons?

3. Have a reason for the changes in the defining characteristics of the fantasy elements you are using. The society the story is taking place in has theft as a capital offence, being a society where personal property and wealth is valued more than life, so a race prone to it would have to be not so identifiable in order to exist in the first place. As for the not-dragons, could be you prefer the terror of death coming from below rather than from above.

So long as there is a purpose, people will either not notice or care that you use them.

 

For some reason, when you mentioned "Do your dwarves have to have beards?" I automatically thought of skin-head midgets with battle-axes/metal poles.

 

There is nothing original under the sun. It has indeed, all been done before.

 

@OP: Don't get so worked up over it.

I won't get into the legality of fanfiction (which is questionable for most of it). For original fiction, either obtain written permission from the author or his attorney (unlikely to happen if you're not a proven, published talent) or avoid using other people's worlds or characters. (An exception could be made for Cthulhu, which I believe may be fair game to appropriate). If you have to borrow characters or worlds, stick with fanfiction.

You can use others' overarching ideas all you want, provided what you write isn't so close that it's deemed derivative. Certain archetype characters and story lines are expected: the tragic hero, the mentor, the urchin or farm boy thrust into events bigger than he can imagine, the antihero shackled with self-doubt, the quest, the romance, the coming of age, the revenge, the "one against the world", etc. You're not going to invent something completely new here, but you can and must put your own spin on it.

As others have said, very few ideas out are truly original. You could theoretically find something untapped in hard science fiction if you pore through the latest and greatest scientific research, but then again, you might not. Forget it in fantasy, where so much has been done before, including truly off-the-wall stuff: executioner's guilds, faerie paladins, warrior princesses riding unicorns, magical systems based on music, ones based on sex with prostitute priestesses, a world of sentient, shape-changing dragons, life through the eyes of a drow, magical worlds where everyone's a super, worlds where the planet is a disk or a sphere with the surface area of one's living room, plant/person hybrids, etc. It doesn't matter in the end. Borrowing ideas isn't plagiarism because stories are more than there core ideas anyway.

Novels need more than one idea, anyway. They need several or they won't stand up for 100k words. And in the end, while the ideas matter, what matters more is that you have believable, organic characters thrust into a compelling situation where the stakes are high enough to care. Write that and people won't care that your elemental magic system has passing similarity to story Y.

 

One of my favorite recently read books is The Name of the Wind (my review), which had hardly a single original idea in it. A plot summary would read like a catalog of TVTropes cliches. But it was still awesome because it was so well-written and such an entertaining story.

And then there was The Adamantine Palace (another review), which I thought would be awesome (dragonriders, except it turns out the dragons are highly intelligent and malevolent and kept docile with drugs, and all it takes is one getting free and all of human civilization will burn...). It wasn't. It sucked, despite being a mix of cliches and somewhat original ideas.

It's all in the execution.

I'm working on a novel too (in addition to my fan fiction). When I started it, I thought it was (kind of) original. Now it seems like every month I read about a new (or not so new) book with a similar concept. Meh, so what? It's all in the execution.

 

I'm seeing this in my head and I just can't get it out! Oh God, I'm feeling claustophobic now. It just keeps on going round and round and round and round and round.

Where the fuck is the kitchen!?

Yeah baisically what everyone else said. If you can pull it off then it doesn't really matter how many cliches your story has.

 

Writing a novel is like making a new recipe for a cake. It's not like anyone expect you to invent new ingredients, it's how you will mix them that matters.

That said, I often wonder how plagiarism works with ideas for a whole words. Everyone and their dog is using LoTR as a basic form of high fantasy world and no one is making a big deal of it. And then you have the whole argument about vampires between creators of Underworld movies and creators of the Vampire: The Masquerade (who in turn where highly inspired by Anne Rice works). Sometimes it can be very confusing.

 

Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, though the world of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders doesn't feel much bigger. (The latter is apropos, given the tenor of American politics and the general decline in the human condition).

 

You can't copyright ideas. Tolkien's estate can't sue you for using elves, dwarves, and a quest to destroy a magic ring. Only if you give them names like Legolas and Gimli. Anne Rice can't sue you for writing a story about angsty homoerotic vampires.* Lawsuits on the basis of some author writing a story that has strong similarities to another story almost always fail.

* All right, they could sue. But they'd lose, assuming both parties actually took it all the way to court.

 

Just remember the old adage: "Stealing from one source is plagarism; stealing from many sources is research."

In other words, mix it up. Based on most legal precedents, as Inverarity said, someone could sue, but they'd lose.

 

Rymrock, you might be interested in hearing Jim Butcher talk about his own experience with the argument of the sanctity of the great idea vs. great execution of tired old cliches. It was posted in a thread about the origins of Codex Alera.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylKRYe0ZWHo

tl;dw: Great execution wins.

 

Whatever ideas you have - just plug at them and plug at them. Then step away for a bit, and plug at them again. Write scenes and shift them around. Eventually, you'll have worked at it enough to present a gaggle of tired cliches in a way that is fresh and appealing.

Even better, you'll come up with a new direction to take your story, and legitimately Google some made-up term that you invented - like "Alarialist," and get pleasantly surprised when no results show up (what JKR experienced with "horcruxes").

 

Aye, and JKR presented us with many an example of taking old ideas and putting a fresh face on them. The idea of 'Elves', for one, and one of my personal favourites. Dozens of magical creatures, some presented in the 'classical' western sense (dragons) and some presented in a slightly edgier way (merpeople).

The AK is itself a derivative of Abra Kedabra. And what do wizards use? Magic wands.

I'm a firm believer in Originality > Influence because I like that element of creativity and think it takes a hell of a lot more skill to make it work... but breathing new life into old clichés can be more successful. Hell, my favourite book series ever is Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, which takes thousands of 'been-dones' and does them better.

 

Another good example would be how the way she adapted common folk lore (especially Celtic), history and mythology, and blended it in with popular culture.

 

Unfortunately though, there are a limited number of concepts out there, and at this point a whole hell of a lot of them have been used before. It's hard to be original nowadays.