In many circles, people use the term “original” as though it’s synonymous with value. If a story is original, it’s highly valuable, whereas if it’s “derivative,” it’s trash. Critics of all stripes wield these reductive labels to validate or dismiss stories without bothering to defend their opinion.
While it’s true that “originality” can make a work better, it’s loaded with baggage, and we have a more accurate word for what it offers audiences: novelty. Here’s why originality should be left to rot so novelty can take its place.
The Quest for Originality Sabotages Storytellers
Unlike novelty, originality emphasizes two things:
- Doing something that has never been done before
- The general ideas behind a work
Put together, this misplaced emphasis puts storytellers in desperate pursuit of “an original idea.” But this is not something they should be doing.
There are almost eight billion people on the planet today. At this point, just about every idea has been done through sheer coincidence, and it’s only going to get worse as time passes. Writing is tough enough without asking people to meet standards that are practically impossible.
In pursuit of original ideas, writers constantly beat themselves up and discontinue perfectly good stories just because they realized someone, somewhere, has already done it. Similarly, many writers are so afraid of the “derivative” label that they treat ideas as less unique than they are. I shouldn’t have to tell people that a character isn’t a clone of Han Solo merely because they are also a swashbuckler.
The emphasis on a story’s ideas rather than their execution is also dreadfully misplaced. While interesting ideas will help a story, they’re the quick and fun part. The real work of storytelling is fitting all the fun ideas smoothly together and bringing them to life. Because of this dynamic, the value of a story is about 1% idea and 99% implementation. A storyteller who gets stuck searching for the perfect idea will never do the work that’s actually important.
Just as unfortunate, a storyteller might latch onto an idea they feel is original and then discover why their idea has been lightly used. It could lead to a story that’s unpleasant for audiences or make plotting into a nightmare. If the execution of such ideas isn’t impressive, the story will crash and burn. However, critics may still praise it merely because it’s different, thereby giving storytellers a perverse incentive to sabotage their work. This is one of the dynamics at play with tragedies, which are disproportionately praised in comparison to their appeal.
Focusing on Originality Reinforces Harmful Myths
Not only does originality place too much value on the ideas themselves, but it also perpetuates the assumption that the ideas we generate are more unique than they are. Without that, critics would have to admit that true originality is infeasible and stop placing so much emphasis on it.
Writers often buy into these falsehoods and become possessive about their ideas. They can be afraid to share their work – sometimes even with professionals who could help them – because they think someone might steal their premise and profit from it. Then there’s the occasional clueless person who tries to trade their ideas to a writer in exchange for royalties on the resulting book. While they’re usually laughed out of town, they shouldn’t be showing up in the first place.
Worse, when writers run into another story with uncanny similarities in ideas, such as the characters, plot, or premise, they often assume it was plagiarized. More likely, the storytellers were thinking in the same direction simply because real-world events repeat themselves, and similar situations inspire similar stories. Even when a similar situation isn’t a factor, complete coincidence is much more likely than plagiarism. You can find “eerily similar” ideas between many stories.
For instance, I once had a commenter roll up and accuse me of taking the example magic system I’d created for an article from a book I’d never read. This was especially silly because the system involved getting magic by eating a plant, and that’s not particularly creative. I’m pretty sure two storytellers can invent that one independently.
Similarly, the news is filled with plagiarism lawsuits that ultimately fail because the resemblance between stories could be coincidence. While the targets of these lawsuits are at least winning their court cases, the lawsuits are still costly for everyone involved.
Plagiarism is very real, but it almost always involves copying not just ideas, but their expression. Again, that’s the valuable part. No one thinks it’s worth stealing someone else’s ideas only to do the hard work of writing the story themself. If they’re inspired by someone else’s work, most writers would much rather ask for permission before they commit all of their time.
Instead, the goal of a plagiarist is to benefit from content without putting in the work to create it. That means stealing the actual text, music, video, etc. Sometimes they make minor or superficial edits to serve their purposes. Often, their changes to the original make it worse. They’re in this for a quick buck or a passing grade, not because they love the art form.
Derivative Works Are Also Valuable
With originality displayed on a pedestal, its opposite is treated like a blight on the arts. But derivative works can offer incredible value just like original works can. While more original works may tread new ground, derivative works can offer a response to the stories that have shaped us.
For instance, take this quote from the author’s note in Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen:
When I was six years old, my favorite book was The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. I was obsessed with the palace at the bottom of the sea and the magic and mystery of the little mermaid’s world. I remember reading that book over and over again, examining each illustration and convincing myself that it was all real. And even though I never saw myself in that story, I wanted to be a little mermaid, too.
Bowen set out to create her own version of The Little Mermaid that would represent Black women and girls. She researched Black mermaids and discovered deities and water spirits from African folklore. Then she added in real world history about the slave trade, spinning all of it together to create a story that had iconic aspects of the Danish fairy tale while honoring Black history and culture. Her novel is deliberately derivative and, in being derivative, performs a vital function that a completely original tale could not.
Fan fiction is much derided for re-spinning existing stories – and for being associated with women, queer people, and other marginalized groups – but it also performs important functions. Many fan fiction stories are designed to ease the stress of high-tension works by offering low-tension personal scenes. Others are “fix-it fics,” which demonstrate ways that problems in the original work could have been rectified. Sometimes fix-it fics focus on craft problems in the original, and sometimes they focus on the underlying messages, exchanging toxic messages for positive ones.
When the derivative nature of a work is a problem, it’s specifically because those derivative aspects are implemented in a way that detracts from the rest of the story. If a storyteller fails to examine their ideas and build their story in an intentional way, they may rehash tropes from popular stories that do not make sense in theirs. Similarly, marketers love to copy whatever made money recently, and they hate to take risks. They can push storytellers into turning what would be a fresh story into a hollow imitation of the latest fad. But in these cases, the problem is not merely that tropes are reused, it is how they are reused.
Altogether, originality is a terrible measure of the quality and value of a work. So let’s look at a better way to discuss the benefit originality can offer.
Novelty Better Represents What Audiences Want
Novelty is our intense interest in things we haven’t encountered before. While originality often provides audiences with novelty, they are by no means synonymous. A hammer covered in mud and wrapped in licorice sticks is original, but it would probably not create novelty in most contexts simply because it is too bizarre and silly.
On the other hand, story elements do not need to be original to provide novelty. Instead, they might simply be new to that audience. The novels Soon I Will Be Invincible and Artemis Fowl delivered lots of novelty to readers by featuring a super villain protagonist. But far from being original, that trope was already well used in comic books.
Novelty can also be generated by mixing story elements that are well-worn but not usually seen together. The movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter gets attention by recasting a historical figure. Similarly, many fanfics add novelty by switching the genre. Fans are fascinated when a beloved character who’s spent seven seasons fighting zombies on TV instead engages in courtly intrigue.
Whereas originality is inherently a binary concept, novelty is a quality that more naturally falls on a spectrum. This means that storytellers can work on improving the novelty of their work without holding themselves to an impossible standard. And whereas the opposite of original is derivative, which can also offer value, the opposite of novel is cliché, which refers to nothing other than the quality of being overused.*
Most of all, novelty better represents the limitations of using new concepts and techniques to generate entertainment. While a work will always be original, novelty is lost quickly. Classic works are often boring because they depended on novelty, and once that novelty faded, they had little to offer.
While every storyteller should cultivate novelty, it should be used alongside other forms of engagement. It shouldn’t be treated as more profound than other aspects of storytelling, as originality often is.
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Imagine looking at a modern day car and saying “Pffft, people were doing this in the 19th century, how unoriginal”.
Another thing to keep in mind with originality is that doing something first rarely means doing it best. With nothing to iterate upon, you usually have to rely on trial and error to find out what works and what doesn’t. Whereas a derivative work can take what worked in the original, tweak or discard what didn’t, and end up with a better product. And even if we disregard that and assume the original work implemented all its ideas perfectly the first time, there’s the simple fact that it will eventually become outdated due to the way the world changes. Technology, scientific knowledge, social values etc all change over time, so even if a work did manage to both be completely original AND implement its brand new ideas perfectly, there will still be value in applying a modern lens to those ideas.
Presumably, most car users don’t really care about the originality or novelty of their car. The same goes for most tools, so the car is probably a bad example.
I mean, that’s kind of the point of the article, isn’t it – that originality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that doing something first doesn’t mean it can’t be iterated or improved upon, and that we shouldn’t care so much about it. May not be the perfect metaphor, but no metaphor is.
Novelty can definitely add to a story, but it doesn’t have to carry it.
I’ve read the second book in the “Dangerous Damsels” series this week, “The League of Gentlewomen Witches”, and the big novelty in the series is that one poem/spell which can be used to levitate objects of any size and weight. The pirates from the first book (“The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels”) use it to fly their houses into battle. The witches use it to discreetly move objects and change situations to their advantage.
Flying houses are novelty, but they’re not what the books are built around. The author also is great at twisting and subverting tropes. She writes the stories as a mix of Gothic novels and Regency romances, but with strong female leads and a lot of action and humour. The flying houses are just the cherry on top, they’re not what the whole series is built on.
Another thing to mention is that people often like to seek out media with particular tropes or of a particular genre (which tropes tend to be the defining factor of). If originality is THAT important, then I guest anyone who has ever had a favourite genre has boring boring bland bland taste.
Good point.
We all have our favourite genres and get warm, fuzzy feelings when they hit the tropes we like reading most – no matter whether they play it straight or twist them a little.
I really crave novelty nowadays. I can re-watch Star Trek and re-read LotR and still love them, but I often tire if I read or watch something new and it’s too similar to stuff I’ve seen before.
For instance, I just read the first trade of the “Coffin Hill” comic, and I thought sure, there’s nothing exactly wrong with this story (except boring artwork with bland faces that all look the same). I was just bored after the first trade because I feel like I’ve read this kind of American gothic horror story with witches and secrets set in New England a hundred times before.
That doesn’t mean I’d trash that story and tell people it was objectively bad. I think of it as a more subjective thing that has to do with my own advanced age. (Ok, I’m 45 so not about to keel over and die from natural causes any time soon, but it’s old enough to have read TONS of comic books and regular books and watched TONS of movies etc by now…)
Basically, nowadays, the bar goes pretty high for me if I’m gonna enjoy something despite having read/watched a hundred similar stories before. It’s gotta have great qualities in other respects. And conversely, the bar for enjoying something that really brings some novelty is much much lower. But once again, that’s me, not some objective truth about story quality.
Age definitely plays a role. I’m 47 myself and I’ve found that I can make pretty good guesses for a story at this point. There’s still books I love to reread, simply because I love them, but I’ve also found myself dipping into new genres here and there (discovered the more fun side of cultivation novels recently).
I mean, I’m 32 and I’m very much in the same boat. Novelty is a huge draw to me, and lack of it a major turn-away. It’s one of the major reasons I gravitate towards more magic-rich high fantasy worlds over more “grounded” subgenres like urban fantasy or dark fantasy. The main exceptions are the stories that I grew up with, and I can admit that that’s 100% down to nostalgia. Deltora Quest is about as cliche as it gets, but it was one of the first high magic high fantasy adventure series I read and likely kick-started my love of the genre, so it’ll always have a place in my heart despite being basically every fantasy cliche ever.
This is pretty much exactly what happened to me and anime. When anime was first getting big in the US when I was in middle/high school it was blowing my absolute mind. Everything anime I encountered was this wild new original thing unlike anything I’d ever seen before, and I devoured it voraciously. But by the time I was in college, for some reason, the new stuff coming over was so much less appealing to me. It all seemed to be ripping off the stuff I had already seen, but not doing as good a job.
It took me a long time to put together that it wasn’t necessarily that the stuff I’d enjoyed had been more original than the stuff that followed, but that all of it was just born from a different storytelling ecosystem that had its own patterns, trends, and tropes and the stuff I’d seen first had the benefit of me not having seen any of the well established material and history IT was borrowing from. I can still look back on a lot of the series I consumed then with nostalgic fondness, but it’s a rare anime these days that catches my attention.
I really don’t get the harsh criticism that the Green Knight gets. A more straight forward telling of the Green Knight would be incredibly short and also not satisfying for modern audiences because they won’t get the entire chivalry ethics, which is basically the point of the story. The movie adaptation gets the point about Gawain learning what it means to be a knight but in a way 21st century audiences in developed democracies could get.
My guess is that a lot of the hate is because the Green Knight was released in the summer but it is not a summer movie. Audiences were expecting more violence and scenes of action that weren’t in the original story either.
I liked The green knight too. It is not a movie I would watch for the plot, but I liked the ambiance. It felt good to watch in the dark of my living room alone with my brother. It was enough for me to enjoy the whole movie.
But interestingly, I think I got the opposite point of yours. I took it more as a critique of the knightly ideals and machismo. Gawain start off the movie as a guy who is loved and quite a good life, but he is insecure because he didn’t do anything deem “great” by the knights who seemed to look down on him. Then he gets trick into a dare by a fey and go on a journey to prove his worth. Anytime in the story, he could have gone back and be with his loved ones. From what I recall, the green knight didn’t say anything wrong would happen if he didn’t go. From what I understood, Gawain would just have been ridiculed by the other knights (or continue to be ignore by them), and that’s it. But instead, he goes. He even takes off his mother’s charm, then die a pointless death. All this to impress a bunch of dudes who never seemed to care about him in the first place.
A third Green Knight fan here.
So I love Mythcreants and I would never have been able to write a coherent fictional story without all the help I got from reading this site and asking questions (still no published novel, but two short stories set in the same universe as my fantasy series are coming out this year! All thanks to Mythcreants!) (in Swedish, though). BUT here’s a general disagreement I have with them (which does not detract from my love, it’s fine to disagree sometimes):
Mythcreants tend to stick pretty dogmatically to the idea that something like, say, the Green Knight, which lacks a tight plot and is very ambigious in places (like the different ways people interpret the ending, and why he took off the charm) could have been made objectively better by giving it a tight plot, make everything clearer, but keep the beautiful environments and stuff. That way, people who already love the movie would love it at least as much, but many people who now hate it would love it too. Pareto-improvement!
I think there’s OFTEN room for such pareto-improvements of stories, but far from always. I’m not so sure I would have liked the movie as much as I did if it HAD been more straightforward and clear-cut, for instance. Same with the sprawling, messy story that is “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell”, which I’ve read several times, and which tons of people love. I’m not so sure everyone who loves it would have loved it at least as much with a simpler, tighter thoroughline.
Same here. I don’t think I would have liked it (at all) if the story would have been more structured and clear, because the weirdness of it all is a good part of the ambiance. I find that I had similar feeling about other movies, like the old Exaculibur, The dead don’t die, and more recently Dune (2022). Sometime the story won’t be super clear, but the world and the feel they give off allow me to half-shut my brain and get lost in it. At least, in a way I can’t with more conventionnal movie.
Althought, story like the green knight probably shouldn’t be used as an example for newer writer that wish to reach a large audience. First, because most people will prefer a more straightforward experience; second, because it is sooooo easy to get lost in your own ideas and to think you’re smarter than you are, and that rules applies to others and not you. Like, green knight resonated with you and me, but not with most folk. And since the goal of Mythcreant is to help aspiring and newer writers, I can get why something like that would rub them the wrong way (Or it’s just not their cup of tea. Different people like different thing, and to be honest regarding Green Knight, I think we both are the outlier here because not that many people seem to have liked it xD).
Yeah, exactly. For my own part, I had all these ideas about turning old delusions and psychotic experiences, and the content of my old notebook I wrote in when I was at psych, into fantasy novels. Great idea, right? The only little problem was that I had NO CLUE how to actually go about turning all of this into something even half-way readable. It’s not that when I tried, I ended up producing some niche, avant-garde stuff – I didn’t manage to make anything readable at all.
Then I found Mythcreants and all those rules for story-telling and I was like ok, I’m gonna take this content and basically squeeze it into the Mythcreants mould. And then eventually I actually had a readable novel.
A lack of coherent story but a focus on ambiance, setting, emotion, and mode is a characteristic of literary fiction. In novels, you also have playing with language as an another addition. Many people do not like this element of literary fiction but I happen to be fond of it. When you had the elements of literary fiction to more structured fiction like mysteries or fantasies, not everybody is going to like the resulting work.
Wow, this is the article I never knew I needed.
Your idea about how ideas are expressed that matters is true. Just take a look at any writing prompt site/blog. It’s essentially the same idea, but the stories generated from it from different authors will be different.
The trouble with originality is that most people want something loosely similar to what they’ve already seen but that does it in a new way. Especially given that nearly everything has been done before. If you haven’t found a single work that has used your big idea in some form, you probably just haven’t done enough research to find it.
One useful way to find novelty is also just a sufficiently good hybrid of existing ideas. You often see this described as the x meets y version of an idea, generally using existing works as references. The Expanse can be described as The Martian meets Star Wars(SF with some real physics in a used future space opera setting). The Greenbone Saga is a wuxia take on The Godfather, using its worldbuilding to justify Hong Kong style action in a gangster saga. The Lady Astronauts of Mars series is Deep Impact meets Hidden Figures, in which an asteroid impact leads to 1950s space development where women were the computers.
This even works for one of the more original premises I have seen in the last few years: Horizon Zero Dawn is a chosen one cavewoman from the future fighting robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow, or Jurassic Park meets Castle in the Sky meets the Hunger Games. This series also shows the trouble with trying for originality. While the first game was beloved in terms of the way it delivered the worldbuilding in a satisfying mystery, the sequel was not as well regarded in this respect despite significant gameplay improvements. Originality has no staying power.
This sort of comparison is something that people marketing novels tend to like, which is why you will often see them in the blurbs at the front of novels. It’s essentially creating a Venn diagram for the target audience.
This reminds me of the difference between realism and verisimilitude – or possibly just the difference between realism and consistency.
Editor’s Note: I’ve removed a comment for mocking the practice of marginalized authors reimagining western fairytales. That there is some racism, folks!