I'm putting this here because you might not be able to access a link...
It was the year 2019 and the Summer Fellowship competition was about to come to pass.
I was perusing through the Ask An Instructor space and noticed a question by Mazzy Mitchell, who was worried about whether or not her writing was unique.
This isn't the first time I've seen this question in all its many forms, but instead of typing out an answer, I had another idea.
People are always so worried about whether their writing (or any other creative endeavor) will stand out from the crowd, or if their ideas are too close to someone else's—that its already 'been done before'.
My normal answer usually includes, 'there's nothing new under the sun, don't worry about it because you are the unique part.'
But sometimes just saying it isn't enough. So I set out to prove it.
Enter the YDubs mid-competition mini story challenge (and thanks to everyone who jumped on board with this idea behind the scenes, as well as everyone who participated too!).
If you remember writing a story about a competition with a rebel, the word 'sail' and a single opening word of dialogue… this is you!
The intent of this experiment was to give you all some tight guidelines where you
needed to include the same things as each other to prove once and for all that even given the same task, you would all produce something completely different.
Because it's not the plot, theme, characters or anything that truly makes a story unique, it's what youbring to it.
And I can assure you that I read all thirty-eight entries and not one of them felt similar to each other.
We'll get to the exact results in a bit.
First, I want to explain a bit more in depth about the concept of story uniqueness and originality, and hopefully this will ease some of your worries.
Original vs. Unique: What's The Difference?
These two words at first glance seem quite similar, thus they are often used interchangeably, but let's take a look at some simple definitions.
Original: Not dependent on other people's ideas, inventive or novel. (Synonyms: innovative, creative, imaginative)
Unique: Being only one of its kind, unlike anything else. (Synonyms: distinctive, individual, isolated)
Hmm. Can you see the difference there?
If something is 'unique', the connotations are that only
one of them exists.
If something is 'original', the connotations are that it's not a copy of someone else's work, it's fresh and new.
Think about how impossible it is to strive to be the ONLY thing out there in the entire world, in all of history and potentially in the future as well.
Very, very, very few things are truly 'one-of-a-kind', rather than just being described that way.
You are unique. No one will ever have the exact same combination of thought processes, experiences, beliefs, morals, skills or personality that you do.
But to
create that uniqueness is another thing entirely.
It's more than just a slip of the word, it's the about the principle. Chasing after creating uniqueness is the equivalent of trying to find a unicorn.
It's just not worth the energy.
Originality on the other hand, is far more attainable. It's far easier to be creative, innovative and imaginative—you all have that in you.
Then just let
your uniqueness shine through, and trust me, there's plenty of that.
We often hear the advice to 'be unique' and the basic idea is good—to stand out amongst the tough competition.
But what they really mean is to be original.
Why 'Unique' Doesn't Equal Good
Let's elaborate with a little example on why striving to write unique things isn't actually as good as it might sound.
My mentor coaches a lot of people through writing and marketing books, and one day a friend came to him and said, "Jonathan, I've just published a book about how to quit vaping, but for some reason, no one's buying it." (If you're unaware of what vaping is, it's an alternative to smoking.)
This friend was already an author with a successful previous book, so my mentor was baffled. The friend had been looking for a book topic and had found a hole in the market.
Thinking this would be a great way to capitalize on sales, he went straight for it.
It's a classic mistake. At first it seems like a good idea because being the 'first' is the best, right?
But therein lies the problem.
There
weren't any other books about how to quit vaping.
People are interested in how to quit smoking because we're well aware of the negative effects to your health, but everyone's just starting to pick up vaping.
Perhaps in a decade or two if negative health effects arise, there will be a need for that book. But right now, no one is interested in how to quit vaping.
Educating a market is expensive.
To sell a book, or anything else, first there must be people willing to buy it.
If they don't know what it is, don't think they'll be interested in it or have never heard of it, you'll be sure that they won't buy it.
You must then take a two-step process—first to educate people on what you're selling, and
thenconvince them to click that buy button.
Do you see how hard that is?
Generally, only huge companies can go on ventures like that because of the huge cost, time and effort involved.
If you do all the work educating the market, everyone who comes after you can now take advantage of that education and out-compete you.
But let's bring this back a notch.
I'm sure you're a lot more focused on getting readers rather than making money… however the principle is the exact same.
Even if the book is free, people still make decisions based on what they've enjoyed before.
When you go into a bookstore or a library, how many of you head straight to your favorite genre, or pick up a book by an author you know?
When you buy a book online, how many of you are shopping in your recommendations or typing in something you think you'd want to read?
We look for
specific things to read and recommend to others—whether that be as broad as Young Adult or fantasy, or as narrow as Christian clean romances set in the Victorian era with a plucky female protagonist, no violence and a happy ending.
Even when we're 'just browsing', we're influenced by our preferences and what we've read before.
The majority of people are either unwilling or don't have the spare time to spend on trying something totally new and unheard of because it's too much of a risk.
Why would a customer risk spending time and money on a book that looks nothing like anyone else's, when they can instead pick up something that they know they'll probably enjoy?
It needs to be recognizable. In non-fiction especially, it needs to solve their problems or give them something they need.
This is why it's so important to know your genre, your target audience, have a great cover and blurb, and most importantly, know your competition—or what books will be sitting next to yours on the shelf.
Your cover is there to entice your audience. Your blurb is there to hook them into the story. You'll notice a lot of books say, 'if you like author
x and author
y you'll love this book.'
All of these factors come together to tell a potential reader,
this is the book for you.
What happens when your book is so unique there isn't a shelf for it?
What happens when your book is so unique people don't know what to search for to find it?
It won't get found, and it won't get read.
Marketing and knowing all this stuff might seem boring if you just want to write, but whether you're going indie or traditional this is part of being an author. No agent or publisher will pick up a book if there's no one to sell it to. It's too risky.
It all circles back to this—being original enough to stand out from the crowd, but not so much that you start to push people away.
J.K Rowling wasn't the first person to write about a boy wizard at a magical school. C.S Lewis wasn't the first person to write about children finding a portal to another land. Stephanie Meyer wasn't the first person to write about a high school vampire romance.
Don't fall into the trap of believing your creations are so different from everyone else that none of the rules apply to you. Yes, your ideas should be original, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel.
The thing is, even originality isn't
as important as you might think. We tend to stick to the same genres and tropes
because we like to re-experience them over and over again.
The chosen one. The love triangle. Rags to riches. The reluctant hero. The quest.
We want a fresh perspective or new take sure, but the base ideas remain the same, just different aspects of the same idea.
5 Tips To Help Your Writing Become Original
You don't need to reinvent the wheel. It's worth saying twice.
On that note, have you ever heard of the saying by Steve Jobs, 'Good artists copy, great artists steal'?
THIS DOES NOT MEAN PLAGIARISE.
'Stealing' in this sense is about taking inspiration from other's works and elevating it with your own ideas.
Remember about there not being anything new under the sun? Any 'idea' that you have that you think is unique isn't.
It's inspired by hundreds if not thousands of nuances and other ideas that you've seen somewhere before that collide together in your brain to make 'your' idea.
We are all constantly being inspired by each other, and that's okay. Those ideas are original.
So that now brings us to this question, how can you be original? How can you give your readers a taste of 'same but different'?
Here's some quick tips:
- Read, read, read
We draw inspiration from the authors who took us on a great journey. We are inspired to take others on a journey just like that.
Not only will reading widely within your genre help spark your imagination, but it'll help show you what people are reading and responding to and what's been overdone.
- Consume information in other formats
The more we have to fill our 'inspiration well' the easier it is for all those things to come together to form original ideas.
Books of course aren't the only valid sources of information—watch tv, the news, blogs, cartoons, anime, listen to other people—honestly all types of information is useful. You never know when you might need it.
- Do your research and planning
I can never stress this point enough. Going hand in hand with reading, you need to understand your genre and tropes well enough to replicate them and break the boundaries.
- Sometimes 'copying' is useful
Imitating who you admire is great practice. There's multiple different ways you can do it and exercises you can check out online.
Handwriting a passage or chapter of someone else's work can help you absorb how they do it, then you can replicate it on your own.
- Borrow someone else's world, story or characters
Sometimes fanfiction gets a bad reputation, but again, it's a great way to practice.
Without the pressure of coming up with your own world and other things you can delve deeper into other aspects they didn't explore and improve your own writing voice.
But enough about that. Without further ado…
The Great YDubs Experiment Results
The challenge was to write a short story under 500 words which included the word 'sail', a competition, a 'rebel' character and the first line had to be one word of dialogue—and we had 38 awesome experimental subjects entries.
Let's go through some quick stats…
Dialogue
Definitely a wide range of words chosen, with the most popular being 'no' and there were a bunch of names used. I award the most creative to 'eyeball'.
Sail
The word 'sail' in its various forms was a pretty even split, 12 referring to sailboats, 12 used as a metaphor and 14 for something actually sailing through the air.
Competition
Here's where it started to get interesting. We had a handful of writing competitions, races, survival, combat tournaments and of course, a fair few about actually sailing.
But we also had ant fishing, chess, bull riding, shooting stars, turtles and golden apples!
Rebellion
Rebellion was a little harder to categorise, but there were a large number of characters rebelling against expectations, outsiders, parents, society and themselves.
Story Premise
But here's what actually matters. Were any of your stories similar? The short answer is no. I tried to sum up your stories in a single sentence, but here's an idea of the kinds of plots we had (forgive me if I got anything wrong):
- Adventurous monkey straying from tribal life
- Girl with birthmark competing in a beauty pageant
- Fighting anxiety during a chess competition
- Insane girl escaping a mental asylum
- Guilty drunkard escaping a maze to a freedom he doesn't deserve
- Forbidden love between angels and mermaids
- Using a magical burrito to cheat in a race
- Undercover detective in Mexico busting a drug deal
- Newly hatched turtle turning towards the street lights instead of the sea
- A personified messy room attempting to achieve perfection
… you definitely can't argue that people didn't come up with creative and original ideas using the same premise.
But here was the real test. I specifically went with 'sail' and 'competition' to see how many people would write a story about some kind of boat race.
Here's the list of story premises that revolved around boats…
- First girl ever to win a race in a motorized watercraft
- Girl searching for new land against her father's wishes
- Overconfident fisherman attempts to prove his skill but dies
- Sailing a catamaran around Africa and getting stranded
- Winning a race to join the war against rebels
- Girl racing sailboats with her aunt the fast, but less safe way
- Winning a race despite having no sail and holes in the boat
- Girl replacing her brother to sail in his stead despite it not being done
- Boy resisting his urge to cheat in a race to satisfy his parents
- A journal of one man's survival story
- Unqualified minorities getting kicked off the boat
Would you say that any of those are the same? If you had a quick scan through them, I can assure you they aren't
I think that if I gave everyone the same task again, even choosing your story premise for you, that you would all still come up with something different.
The bottom line is, relax.
Don't worry if someone else has a protagonist with red hair, or if you read a book about a war and it inspired you to write a book about war.
You're already creative and original just as you are.
Do you need any more proof? No?
So… go forth and write!
Be creative. Be original. Because you already cover that 'uniqueness' just being you.
THIS IS AN ARTICLE FROM THE YOUNG WRITERS' WORKSHOP. I DID NOT WRITE THIS.
