Writing Mistakes You're Making

Plot: Be Original!

Depending on who to talk to, there is/are only one/seven/twenty/thirty-six/etc. basic plot lines in the world, and every single other story idea is a regurgitation of that. This is true, but don't be discouraged. I'm not going to talk about plot like everything is cliché, because not everything is. Simply because you're recycling Shakespeare (and you didn't even notice!) doesn't mean it can't be original. 

Yes, it’s hard these days to think up something original (look at the number of movies based off of books). It can be done though, and it can be done by you. Oftentimes, ironically enough, original ideas can come from reading or watching movies. Do you ever get to a point where you wonder what would have happened if something completely different had occurred? Sometimes this can be the jumping off point –– just keep changing aspects until you come out with something completely different from what you started with. You are allowed to use anything for inspiration. Ideas change and evolve, and you have to keep building on them to get you to a whole new world (Disney shoutout!). 

Example: I got the idea for my science fiction book from a friend. His idea went something like, “What if you had a bunch of people who lived in a museum and couldn’t get out, because they’d been told a bomb went off and killed everyone else and made the rest of the world unsafe? And generations went by with these people living in the museum, until one boy decided to go outside and see what happened, but there were a lot of challenges along the way, until he finally got out and realized that they’d been living a lie; the bomb had never gone off.” Well, if you’ve read my book, you know that the story is nothing like that (instead it’s about a girl who is given up by her parents to be part of an experiment, which is just one of many striving to derive the formula for human happiness). That’d be because one thing led to another and soon it became unrecognizable. And if you were wondering, it was a museum because he wanted the main character’s name to be George Washington or something of the sort, and he figured the people could name the kids after things they found in the museum. Oh, and I reserve the rights to the idea, I might make a story out of it someday!

Another place to get original ideas from is to combine plots. Take two aspects that to the untrained eye couldn't possibly ever have something to do with one another and transform it into a plot no one has seen before. 

Example: There have been stories about shipwrecks before, tales of survival until the castaway(s) reach salvation. There have also been stories of wild animals interacting with humans. There have also been stories about religious people. But there had never been a story about someone who practiced three separate religious simultaneously and also happened to be stuck on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for some two-hundred odd days until it was written into a novel known as Life of Pi.