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Post by firebird on Mar 5, 2022 13:22:57 GMT -6
This is a bit of a toughie but I thought I'd put it out there anyway incase other writers also face the same dilemma.
I've no problem "making up" a plot and intertwining the details into the larger narrative. Where I am stumped is "inventing" something cool. For example, an inventive game, a weapon, a unique type of character. Anything I think of has already been done. Doing a variation of an existing character for instance a mermaid and tweaking it and calling it something else is not satisfying nor is it unique.
Is there any way that writers invent stuff?
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Post by Alatariel on Mar 5, 2022 14:26:16 GMT -6
This is a bit of a toughie but I thought I'd put it out there anyway incase other writers also face the same dilemma. I've no problem "making up" a plot and intertwining the details into the larger narrative. Where I am stumped is "inventing" something cool. For example, an inventive game, a weapon, a unique type of character. Anything I think of has already been done. Doing a variation of an existing character for instance a mermaid and tweaking it and calling it something else is not satisfying nor is it unique. Is there any way that writers invent stuff? So, many people say "there are no new ideas" and that's basically true. And we have to be okay with that as writers and creators. What is considered new? Putting things together that aren't usually put together. A cheerleader + chosen vampire slayer = Buffy. People like familiarity, in fact we search for beloved tropes when wanting new books to read. It's not a bad thing to have tropes and archetypes in your books. It's not bad to have energy weapons or a sport that has similar rules to football (see Quidditch) or a mythical creature that's well-known. We can get trapped in this mindset of finding truly NEW and unique ideas and therefore doing nothing. The best thing we can do is consume a lot of material in our chosen genre (read a lot of modern fantasy or science fiction or paranormal romance) so that we know whats 1) expected for the genre and 2) overdone. There's a reason people read books in the same genre over and over, because they like the general expectations for that genre and we subvert them too much we end up alienating our audience. For people who love reading mermaid-ish books, a race of underwater beings with their own culture and history is always going to be unique because YOU created it. Having a mixture of familiar things put together in unexpected ways is how we create "new" things.
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Post by ScintillaMyntan on Mar 6, 2022 0:16:08 GMT -6
I think it can't be forced. You're more likely to come up with a really original game when thinking playfully about something unrelated, than if you need to put a game in your story and try to actively make one up.
But when I need to actively invent for a story, I think about how I can reinforce the themes or motifs.
Let's take mermaids. If the story was about individuality versus conformity, I might have my mermaids reflect that somehow, like in their society they tie themselves to their family members with seaweed so they must stay within a certain distance. If the story was about renewing oneself after failure, I'd have a mermaid make it a personal quest to build an adult-sized replica of a mermaid egg, which is very complicated to make and requires a lot of rare materials hence subplots, so she can symbolically re-enact her birth. Something like that. That gives me mermaids that are different from the usual and rather original, while really being significant to the overall story.
The same goes even if the game, weapon, or mermaids aren't important to the plot, just a side detail. Their existence will help 'explore' the theme. I did something like that for my latest story. I needed to come up with a cult. Guilt is an important theme in the story, and rain is an important image, so I made the cult preoccupied with sin and purity and have beliefs about the rain.
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Post by pelwrath on Mar 6, 2022 1:14:32 GMT -6
In my space opera, i created a game that used something similar to a Chinese Checkers board and the game Feudal. I mention the pieces once amd describe the MCand his father playimng the game once. Does it actually work as a playable game? I don't know but it sounds like t does.
My vampires, like everyones else, says their's are different and how can you really change a vampire. I thought about it, did some research and talked with my dad, a retired podiatrist about muscles and blood and things. I came up with a different vampire. Mine area mutation of anemia. What we think about vampires was created by them.
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Post by HDSimplicityy on Mar 10, 2022 23:46:45 GMT -6
That is really hard. You stumble around making it your fresh take on something and don't get anywhere you like. Alatariel already said it: there are no new ideas. However, this just came to mind. An original item, person, idea, can be a three part combination: two existing ideas and one cool one from your brain. If that's too complicated, you could take common character traits and mix-n-mash them, for example. What you want to be fresh might also come from writing more than one draft.
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