telling a story that's already been told
Two times in my life, I have come up with a captivating story idea only to later find out that it has already been done years before me. One might suppose that I resent these authors a little. I don’t. I actually find it rather inspiring. I feel like it must speak to my creativity that I thought up something that was anything close to something they had come up with, especially since they are both authors who I now very much look up to.
The first is a story idea I came up with when I was about 16 years old, and very much enchanted by Pride and Prejudice. I had decided to write a story that was heavily inspired by that, where a woman needing inspiration for characters in her new book, people watches at a local café. After overhearing a conversation between what seems to be a haughty dashing businessman and his cheerful naïve friend, she decides to use their dynamic in her story which centers on the businessman manipulating his friend. Only later does she realize that the businessman she was so put off by is really a higher up at the publishing company she works for. I had not yet begun reading Georgette Heyer in earnest, but a few years later when I looked back at this idea, I was stunned to see that it is basically a modern version of Sylvester, but with the Pride and Prejudice characters. Sylvester does have similar elements to Pride and Prejudice, so the fact that I managed to connect the two is not completely unexpected, but that I managed to conceptualize the basic plot of Sylvester at all was extremely shocking to me.
The second was more recent. I came up with an idea of a creature that was basically a personification of anxiety, where it would infest your mind like a parasite and drive you crazy if you did not manage to calm it down. And at that time I had not yet read Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full Of Sky, which if you have read it, you will know that the hiver’s concept is very similar to that. While this one did shock me a little more than the unintentional Sylvester retelling, I also felt more joyful about it. Even though at this point in my life I’ve only read a few of his books, I love Pratchett’s world building dearly, and as someone who is attempting to write a fantasy novel for the first time, it was encouraging to see that I had a similar creative thread to a writer I very much look up to without him even influencing me to be so.
I have written many other stories that are consciously drawing influence from other authors, but these are the only two where I thought of them completely independently. I also won't be discarding either of these ideas. I don't have to be innovating every moment of my storytelling. They're still good ideas, even if someone else has already used them.
~dys