BLOG: On originality (Patreon)

Hey, just wanted to talk a little about originality in stories, characters, etc.

THIS MIGHT BE JUST NONSENSE, I'll just put what I think in order and try to not complicate myself to pretend that I know the final answers.

evidently, there's a tendency of people to critice things that are too similar to another idea.

I spet a lot of time finding originality when I was a teen, even undestanding that was very difficult to come up with something that's 100% original, in general, as much as we can hope is to come up with a mixture or a fresh/personal perspective over topics and ideas that were already done.

We all have influences, and a creative's job from my perspective is to process those influences and come up with something that could be perceived a new.

I just wanna do a small advice on how I approach this thing:

1- Process/analyze your inspirations?

which is mostly just analyze why certain things work in the story you like, that's why I say "process" it.

Why do you like Avatar: the last air bender story? do you think it's because the powers are cool? bending elements is a cool thing! right... or is it because the story is well written, characters well developed and the bending element and general idea of the story just NEEDS this mechanic to exist? heck, the elements also represent a personality type, and these personalities are also very important for the story/world to work.

THE HOBBIT, as many other elements from LOTR are inspired by legends and tales like Beowulf... a dragon steals a goblet and then goes to destroy a town, sounds familiar? but which was the moral behind it? maybe that's what important here.

that's what's important for me in the sense of inspirations. Understand why, and try to find WHY certain things move you, and work for you... and why that could be implemented, it doesn't even mean it has to be the same.

2- Cool idea or necessary idea?

we all like so many things, but it's important to just focus in a just a few ideas at the time.

have you noticed stories have a theme? and even characters got a general theme attached to them? it's because in general, a story is made, in general, to answer a single "big question" and most of the time a single theme (or few) can  TIE UP a whole story.

if you try to make a story with every "cool" thing you like it becomes so difficult to handle, and so messy, I'm not sure it's possible to get it right or coherent.

heck, it's even worse in just one character right? like the choosen one with every single power, also a vampire or a demon... also with a tragic past.

Just try to apply the ideas that work well together. not every single cool idea is necessary, hell, even some cool ideas become bad once they're mixed up with other ones. sadly I think only experience can make you realize which.

3- bottomline, none of this matters if something is well excecuted.

I read once that Tolkien didn't cared about which elements were the base ingredients of the story he was writing, as long if the final product was "good"

“We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled."

thing is, even if you're not being original, hell, even if you're plain copying something, but you do a good writing job, a good design job and all that, you could end up with something that still could stand on its own.

everything is important in different degrees, and sometimes originality or totally amazing "ideas" aren't even that important for something to be good... as experience and execution of whatever you're doing will end up being much more important.

(I'd say most roleplaying game settings are just a mixture of everything cool about a certain topic, and you still get lots of fun being a hero or whatever if the game experience is good!)

would you believe me if I told you that originally, these were my main influences to come up with the first Derideal comic I made:

• the beginning of Baldur's gate 2 where a mage torture your main character to unlock their "hidden power"
• Silent hill 2 emotional value over a significant other.
• Dune focus on biology instead of technology, also how it focus a lot on human capability instead of more technology.
• Mewtwo movie beginning. (pokémon 2000 movie)
• Robocop "corporative" world setting and technology.
• my most special "cat" pet had recently died.

I attached some wips just to not make this boring, sorry if it's too long.

maybe there's something good in all this, but honestly, read this with a grain of salt.