How to turn Inspiration into Originality for Fiction Writing
There are many people out there who like writing fiction, however only a small fraction of fiction writers manage to make a career out of it. In the film industry for example, 98% of screenplays are rejected nearly instantly. There are many reasons as to why pieces of fiction can fail, but for many writers, one of the most difficult aspects is creating a truly unique story, concept, or premise. Some writers draw inspiration from other forms of media they love; however, they end up taking too much inspiration and end up with something that appears to be nothing but a knock-off, or worse, plagiarism. An example of this would be the controversy between The Hunger Games, which many claim is plagiarism of a Japanese novel titled Battle Royal. Another example would be the fourth part in the Twilight series which is claimed to be a copy of a novel known as The Nocturne. And this lack of creativity isn’t limited to supposed plagiarism. A quick Google search can show dozens of rip offs of movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. From my own personal experience writing novels and short stories, I can give some advice to change inspiration into originality.
One way writers make their writing unique may seem simple and obvious: taking inspiration from multiple sources. A lot of the time, writers get fixated on taking inspiration from one source that they admire, which creates two problems. The first is that any and all uniqueness has to come from you alone, meaning that less creative individuals will ultimately end up making a copy of their inspiration. But lets say you are more creative than the average person. What’s the problem then? The problem then is that, only having one source of inspiration ends up creating a sense of competitiveness with that single source. With a sense of competition with your inspiration it can easily lead to a writer either copying a large portion of their single inspiration or it could simply lead to the writer losing confidence in their work since they won’t feel like they can compete against their inspiration.
Instead, take inspiration from multiple sources, especially ones that aren’t similar. This will allow you to hybridize concepts into a story that is far more unique due to the differences in source material. This is exactly how I come up with concepts for my novels.
The novel I am currently working on titled Ikarigaia takes inspiration from seven different sources that have nothing to do with each other, including four TV series, a movie franchise, a video game, and a website. I started off only taking inspiration from one of these seven sources, so when I started writing it, it wasn’t unique at all, but as I slowly began taking in more and more inspiration, I managed to contort the story into a unique novel concept. When I started out, the novel was only based on two characters from an animated series known as Future Diaries. I pretty much just took the two main characters and tried creating a story off of that. There wasn’t even any plot or anything, all I had was a main character that was overly winy, and a female antagonist who was insane. Other than that, the only two other bits of inspiration I took from Future Diaries was the age of the characters and the starting location, which was the main characters high school. Over time however, I started coming up with a plot by adding in the concept of super natural powers, which is where I took inspiration from the Godzilla franchise. In the novel, the powers the characters posses are those of monsters from another universe, and many of the inspirations for the monsters came from Godzilla. Later on I’d even take some inspiration for powers from two other TV series, Re:Zero and Avatar: The Last Airbender. With all the powers planned out and a general idea of how all the characters act. Once again, characters in the novel were created by hybriding characters from multiple sources of inspiration, such as Call of Duty: Black Ops, Overlord, Death Note, and several other sources I already mentioned. Even the motivations of the main character are created from hybrid inspirations. In my novel, the main character’s goal is to protect those he cares about, which I took inspiration from Re:Zero, however in order to accomplish this goal he does many morally questionable things like the main character from Overlord. I could make an entire paper about how I combined different sources of information, but hopefully this gets the point across. The best way to create something unique is to combine inspirations into something unique.
Because I was inspired by so many different works of fiction, I didn’t feel a sense of competitiveness with any of them. Simply because I took aspects of each of my seven sources of inspiration, I didn’t feel the need to compare it to any one source since the other six sources would make my work so much different from any one source. Of course, this doesn’t mean you always need seven or more sources of information. Even taking inspiration from two sources can be enough, though I do recommend taking inspiration from at least four.
Taking inspiration from multiple sources isn’t the only thing I recommend. My second tip for writing unique fiction is to apply aspects of your life to the story and characters. This doesn’t mean you have to make every character autobiographical, but instead take aspects of people you know, or take inspiration from events that occurred in your life. Not only does this method allow for a greater level of creativity, since you’re now taking into account your own life experiences, but you’re also provided with a more personal connection to the story itself.
Again, I’ll refer to my own work. Several years ago, I remember an incident where a lawyer blocked off the parking lot to a building my mother owned because he was mad that his car was scratched by someone entering the lot. Because of that guy, my mother had to leave in the middle of the night to deal with the issue. I took that incident as a source of inspiration for my novel and altered it slightly to fit a more dramatic theme and tone. I took this incident and used it to create a plot point where a rich businessman hires people to cause damage to the property of the main character’s mother. Of course, these two situations are completely different from each other, but I never would have come up with this plot point without that experience.
Writing fiction is not at all an easy task. It can take years just to come up with a good concept, and even then it can take several more to actually turn that concept into a fully written out fiction story. Even harder than that is coming up with something unique that isn’t simply a ripoff of someone else’s work, but that is part of the job for fiction writers. The first step of every fiction piece is the concept which can sometimes be the hardest part. But if we just look to our inspirations for writing, anyone can be a proficient writer.
