wrestling with possibilities
Apr. 6th, 2011 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliIt's one thing to get ideas. It's another to get fresh, original ideas. And yet a third to get fresh original ideas that do more than remind you that nothing gets to be cliched without having a lot going for it.
It's quite possible for a story to read like a cliche in outline and still be fresh and original in telling. Plots are not the only things that can be fresh and original, and with the limited number of plots in existence, the bare-bones account may sound cliched. But it does not feel like the way when contemplating the outline.
And while wrestling with originality and wanting my worlds to be more wacky, weird, and wonderful -- I find many fantasy settings to be heavier on world-building than wonder -- I run across a comment about a writer of mysteries who was trying to read a fantasy novel but couldn't cope because it had this magical wand in the first chapter, and she didn't get it. Which inspires the depressing thought that if the ordinary fantasy tropes can limit your audience, more striking ones probably limit it even more.
It's quite possible for a story to read like a cliche in outline and still be fresh and original in telling. Plots are not the only things that can be fresh and original, and with the limited number of plots in existence, the bare-bones account may sound cliched. But it does not feel like the way when contemplating the outline.
And while wrestling with originality and wanting my worlds to be more wacky, weird, and wonderful -- I find many fantasy settings to be heavier on world-building than wonder -- I run across a comment about a writer of mysteries who was trying to read a fantasy novel but couldn't cope because it had this magical wand in the first chapter, and she didn't get it. Which inspires the depressing thought that if the ordinary fantasy tropes can limit your audience, more striking ones probably limit it even more.