Telling Tales

Have all the stories been told? 

If you are a cynic, then yes.  No one is saying anything new, all writers are just repeating a handful of narratives with a new paint job. 

To a point I agree.  Generally speaking, new plots are hard to come by.  And I’m okay with that.  Here’s the deal, we all are influenced by what we read.  That’s all there is to it.  I’ve talked about this before, but it’s true.  Most writers try to keep reading, even while they are creating.  It helps, believe me.

Where I diverge from the cynical side of the observation is this idea that there is nothing new, or nothing original.  Just because we are reading the same basic narrative doesn’t mean it can’t be done in a new, or exciting way.  Who the characters are, their flaws, their loves, their struggles these are the aspects that make a book/story worth reading.

Even if the idea is still as basic as stop the bad guy before he destroys the world, the details of the world, the people, the history and the like are what make a story worth reading/writing.  I often cite Brandon Sanderson as an example, because he takes narratives that are familiar and gives them his own unique spin.  His Stormlight Archive is easily one of my favorite series I’ve ever read, and it only has three books, so far.

For example, and I’m going to be vague to avoid too many spoilers, a love triangle seemed to be forming during one of the arcs.  And instead of torturing his characters like a bad teen drama, he had them act like the reasonable adults they were.  It was resolved by the end of the book, to everyone’s satisfaction.  (At least everyone in the story, I won’t speak for other fans.)

He presented a familiar trope in fantasy, one we’ve seen that often leads to future complications, and instead of following the same path so many others have walked down, he did his own thing.  It was refreshing to see/read. 

One of the issues that I’ve been seeing crop up in my own writing are “cop drama clichés”.  There are certain things that people have come to expect from police drama.  The question I end up facing is to follow the path that has been walked or try and make my own.

Right out the gate I’m at a bit of an advantage, because my characters have superpowers.  However, that leads to the potential for following other clichés.  There are some I’ve embraced, and some I’ve tried to avoid.  I don’t personally like interpersonal drama in books/tv.  I’ve done my best to avoid it, except in volume one, but even that was dealt with, and was never a focus.

Don’t get me wrong, my characters are going to face issues outside of the crimes they are trying to solve, but the idea isn’t to add more drama, for the sake of drama.  My goal is to always present what I believe to be a realistic scenario, problems that could actually arise from the decisions the characters have made.  Manufactured drama is boring, irritating and lazy writing.

If all the stories have been told, then I’m going to do my best to put a new spin on things, so at the very least the reader will be entertained.