One night in college I was walking home from a party with one of my closest friends. We were both stone cold sober and it was before midnight (I had a fairly PG-13 college experience), but if it makes the story more interesting you can imagine me stumbling along the sidewalk at four in the morning with a Llama we just stole from a zoo and dyed pink.
I was telling him about an idea for a story I was writing which involved zombies (typical for Creative Writing nerds on a Saturday night). We were crossing the street and heading back on campus when I said, “The only problem is the idea has been done so many times before.”
My buddy’s response: “But it hasn’t been done by you so it hasn’t been done right.”
This nugget of wisdom has stuck with me ever since.
He didn’t mean for me to take his advice literally. He didn’t want me to spit on my copy of Night of the Living Dead and scream, “All zombie stories not written by me are trash!” My friend didn’t say this to put down other people’s work. He said it to pull me out of my self-defeating mindset.
Storytellers, especially genre storytellers, are almost always going to run into similar tropes. Space epics will generally have some sort of spaceships. Fantasies will usually have a magic system. Zombie stories will almost always have a small group of survivors fighting against a mob of the undead.
What I think my friend was trying to tell me is we need to make our fictional stories more unique by bringing our own experiences to them. Obviously many people will say, “But I don’t have any unique experiences. I worked as a barista in college while studying philosophy and now I process checks. How will this help me write a space epic?”
To this I say: Well, what did you learn while working as a barista? You had wave after wave of cranky customers demanding you get their order right or else they’d snarl at you. Sounds like you could apply these situations to a horror story. Or you could write a whole fantasy epic that circles around a coffee shop, or an office building the way Harry Potter is set around a school. And if you studied philosophy that opens us a whole universe of various concepts you can apply to genre fiction.
And this isn’t even taking into consideration all the other life experiences you’ve had: getting dumped, screwing up on your first day of work, adopting a kitten/puppy. You could apply all these events to genre fiction. What’s it like to get your heart broken the night before you learn how to be a sorcerer? What’s it like to screw up on your first day of work when you literally don’t know anyone else on the planet? What’s is like to adopt a zombie?
Whatever kind of story you’re trying to tell has probably…no, definitely been told before, but one key to making yours stand out is looking at your life and the experiences you’ve had that have made you the person you are today, drawing from them and telling a story no one else could tell. The story’s window dressing might be familiar but the heart will be all its own.
