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Media, entertainment, speculative fiction -- it's all here at the City of Kik. Discuss movies, television, theater, books, music, comics. Everything from mainstream pop culture to fringe cult delights. HOME Archives: 
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Stories and Originality As a writer, I always hope that every story I come up with is creative and unique. But as a wise person once noted, there are really only so many stories you can tell – after a while, it just becomes variations of the same theme: boy meets girl, a young novice on a hero's journey, etc. I understand all that, but it's still funny (not in a "ha ha" kind of way) when I work on a story that I think is pretty original only to find out later that someone else has thought up something pretty similar. Here's what got me thinking about all this. As some of you might know, one of my recent writing projects is an ambitious stage adaptation of John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost." Well, no sooner had I gotten about a fourth of the way through my first draft, when I came across this article in Science Fiction Chronicle Magazine: "Legendary Pictures is making a live-action film version of Milton's "Paradise Lost," recounting Lucifer's rebellion and the subsequent fall from grace of Adam and Eve. The film will be directed by Scott Derrickson ("The Exorcism of Emily Rose") and written by Phil DiBlasi and Byron Willinger." I'm sure I wasn't the first (nor will I be the last) to think about adapting a classic. (Some might point out that I was ripping Milton off years ago with my story "To Forgive Divine"). But the timing of this news is what made me laugh. And I'm sure the film version will be a lot different than my ideas for a stage version, but still. It wasn't as much of a shock as learning that Alan Moore was publishing his "Lost Girls" graphic novel about the "coming of age of Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy of Oz, and Wendy of Peter Pan fame." Some of you who read or saw my "Dream Fragments" anthology might remember my story "The Shopkeeper of Lost Dreams" which tells the tale of a grown up Alice and Dorothy on a journey to find themselves. Granted, my play is more surrealist and symbolic and Alan Moore's is (as he readily admits himself) "pure pornography," but still. The ideas are still a little similar. And all along I thought I was being pretty darn original. Then there's the great novella I wrote with my buddy Robert La Vallie years and years and years ago called "The Trials of John Summer." It was a gripping tale about the sensational trial of a charismatic man who happened to murder his family in cold blood and, despite his obvious guilt, a jury of his peers finds him innocent of the charges against him. Anyone reading the story today would think that we were a bunch of talentless hacks trying to write a fictional account of the O.J. Simpson saga. But our copyright documents prove that we wrote that story many years before the true-life crime that turned O.J. from a legendary football and movie star into a notorious guy who many believe got away with murder. That's just another ironic twist in the life of Nick the Writer. That's not even the most morbid example. Have any of you seen my student film "Rambo's Revenge?" It's the lovely tale of an outcast who flips out and decides to gun down his enemies in school. This was a year before the movie "Heathers" came out, and many, many years before the real life Columbine massacre took place. My early student film was arguably tough to watch before, but now even more so. The moral of this essay: keep writing and keep trying to be original, even when coincidences like that happen. Even Shakespeare's plots were often based on familiar tales, but it's all about how you tell the story that makes it your own. |