# Question of Originality



## Rsyk (Dec 17, 2009)

Before I start, I'd just like to say that yes, I realize this may be a repost of an earlier thread with essentially the same topic. (Fresh Ideas by M. Le Renard, http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=18668) But this question has been bugging me for a long time, so I wanted to ask right out.

How much does it matter to you that a work is truly original?

I'm not speaking of the plotlines, per say, but the overall affect created by the themes and characters. For instance, since the rise of Harry Potter, any fiction involving magical kids has been compared to those works. One example is that of Charlie Bone. Now, the settings and premises of these books are very similar, kids with magical powers going to a school. But I find that the tone and characters create two works that I would call similar, but are still original. Despite this, I worry almost constantly that I might be borrowing to much from a particular series when I write. 

Of course, when you apply all this to furry writing, it gets even more entangled. Discrimination, race, transformation, it's all been done a thousand times before. But, what does it take for an author to comment on this in a different way?

Really, I'm only asking because there have been many, many times where I've completely scrapped many ideas because they looked to me like they were far to close to another person's story. And now, I've got a few more stuck in my head that are dangerously close to the same fate. I just wanted to get some second opinions before I start everything over from scratch. :cry:


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## TakeWalker (Dec 17, 2009)

Is this disregarding the "nothing is original anymore" train of thought?

People do still come up with original ideas, methinks, but they tend toward novel rehashings and reimaginings.


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## PheonixStar (Dec 17, 2009)

It doesn't bother me, personally. Hell, look at the princess stories. Hello... what's more popular than the Snow White, Cinderella, blah blah blah stories? These are all enduring classics, but they're little different from each other. 

Tell me which story I'm describing:

Evil older woman tries to prevent perfect femme fatale from marrying prince.

Oh, wait... ALL OF THEM?!

They're all just stories. The question, in my personal opinion, isn't whether or not the premise is original as much as it is... can you entertain me? Is it fun? Will I come away from it feeling both satisfied, yet sorrowful that I'm saying good-bye to the characters I've gotten so attached to over the last pages?

Hell, consider David and Leigh Eddings. Their books have been even bestsellers... and they're very formulaic.

People often demand originality of works like it's salvation itself... but the same people will love the "classics" that are often as formulaic as it gets.

Furthermore, perhaps this is sacrilegious, but I don't think it's a good thing to let any story die if you can help it. THINK OF THE STORY, MAN! How would you like being thrown in the trash?


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## Rsyk (Dec 17, 2009)

True, true.

For me it always came down to the character of the book, and I mean that in both the actual characters and the way it's written. Again, using contrasting example, there are the books by Robin Cook. (I'm speaking specifically of Contagion, and the ones in those series.) And another I recently read by a different author, whose name I cannot remember. The book was called Beat the Reaper, though.

Both star incredibly sarcastic doctors, yet the tone is so incredibly different...

The reason why I'm asking all this is because while I am guilty of letting stories die, sometimes with a tremendous amount of effort having been put into them, (Last years NaNoWriMo, which I destroyed after finishing it...on time!) I want to get better about getting an idea down on paper. Specifically, I know that the theme of my current idea has been overdone to death, but I'm trying to see an angle from which it could all be seen differently...


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## M. LeRenard (Dec 17, 2009)

Works that aren't very original tend to sell better.  People like what they're comfortable with.  If only for that reason, you shouldn't be scrapping your ideas just because they're similar to someone else's.
I've come to understand that it's not originality you should strive for, but rather... let's call it 'freshness'.  Your work has to be fresh.  In other words, even if you choose to dig up an old plotline, you shouldn't just dust it off and put it out there for people to gawk at.  They've already seen that one.  Instead, you just use it as a base, but then decorate it and add your own personal flair.  Dress it up in your style, and add some new elements to it that you come up with.  The base is still there, and people will still see it, but if you've done a good enough job adding on to that base no one will care.
If you're finding that your works are too similar to other peoples', tweak them until they're yours.  But don't throw them out unless you think they're horrible or something.


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## Atrak (Dec 18, 2009)

Rsyk said:


> Before I start, I'd just like to say that yes, I realize this may be a repost of an earlier thread with essentially the same topic. (Fresh Ideas by M. Le Renard, http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=18668) But this question has been bugging me for a long time, so I wanted to ask right out.
> 
> How much does it matter to you that a work is truly original?
> 
> ...



Read my sig.


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## foozzzball (Dec 18, 2009)

All stories are the same, there is no originality, etc etc etc.

If you fail to write an original story I tend not to read it. Originality in this context is doing something different to what I have come across before. Young Adult authors get a free ride and get to churn out the same old tired stuff because young adults haven't read much.

I just recently had this problem when confronted with the SF section at my local bookstore - they were mostly, from the looks of it, rewriting books I'd read before. Why yes, the end of the world as confronted by plucky hero is a pretty broad concept, lots to work with there, but I'm a little tired of stories bound to that right now, thanks...


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## GraemeLion (Dec 18, 2009)

This comes down to what one author mentioned in a book I'm reading.  If you look at the markets that are available for sale, like Analog, F&SF, Heat, Etc., the editors have a very specific set of circumstances that make a story "good or bad."   

So they are, essentially, looking for "The same, but different."  They want stories that feel the same.  But they want different stories.  

The longer fiction market is no different.  People want the same overarching plot, but they want it with different characters doing different things in different settings.  They want the familiarity, but also the unique.  

One such archetype is "The Hero's Journey," which Joseph Campbell discovered.  Most every Harry Potter book follows this, as does Star Wars, the Lion King, and thousands of pieces of fiction both literary and genre.  

Yet no one complains that those are "unoriginal." (Well, maybe the Lion King, but they complained it was unoriginal for different reasons.) 

"The same, but different" is just something we as writers have to deal with, appreciate, and leverage.


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## foozzzball (Dec 18, 2009)

GraemeLion said:


> One such archetype is "The Hero's Journey," which Joseph Campbell discovered.  Most every Harry Potter book follows this, as does Star Wars, the Lion King, and thousands of pieces of fiction both literary and genre.



Joe Cambell didn't discover it, he _invented_ it by piecing together pieces of various bits of mythology and wedging them together very forcefully. He also pinioned it together with some crazy freudian and similar interpretations. 

Chip on my shoulder? Why yes - Campbell's hero's journey only holds any water now because another hack, Lucas, picked it up and ran with it fast enough that Hollywood decided it was significant.

What's significant about Campbell's work, in my opinion, is that he's trying to systemize something which not many people tried looking at systematically before. That's about it.

The Hero's Journey is roughly on par with the three act structure - if you try hard enough you can wedge almost every story into it.

And please, do not confuse 'what the market wants' with issues of originality. Technically, markets get plied with mountains of crap that is either unusable, similar to what they've already got, or blessedly original and beautiful. They want blessedly original and beautiful, but get none of it. The majority of people who assume that's what they've written are wrong. 

Plus slush piles are huge and read by angry monsters who want to kill you with a sharp rejection to the face.

A nice original story is deeply important, and getting the furry angle right on an original story is quite hard. 

The original poster wanted reassurance over whether or not they should write their stories that feel similar to other stories.

Absolutely.

You have to get very, very familiar with what's already been written - often by writing some yourself - before you can even  _hope_ to find an 'original' angle or two to play with in your fiction.

Read what's on the market, write a lot. Originality, if it will ever happen, will happen naturally as a process of that.


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## Poetigress (Dec 18, 2009)

foozzzball said:


> Young Adult authors get a free ride and get to churn out the same old tired stuff because young adults haven't read much.



Um, no, they don't. Your argument might hold water if the entire publishing process were run by teenagers, but a YA manuscript still has to appeal to the editors, bookstore buyers, book reviewers, librarians, teachers, etc., who are all adults and have read quite a bit. If it seems like YA can be full of "the same old tired stuff," I think it's no more so than any other reading range or genre, where trends get started and followed until they burn out.



GraemeLion said:


> If you look at the markets that are available for sale, like Analog, F&SF, Heat, Etc., the editors have a very specific set of circumstances that make a story "good or bad."



I agree with what you're saying, but... I can't believe you just mentioned Analog, F&SF, and Heat in the same sentence.  That's a new one.

Basically, I think MLR covered my opinions on this, though instead of freshness I would call it uniqueness. Your story is probably not going to be 'original' in the sense that most people use the word. The stories we think of as original really just combined very old plot concepts and so on in new ways. So I'd worry about writing something unique -- the story only you can tell in just this way, with your skill, your personality, your style -- and not about trying to concoct something no one has ever seen the likes of before.

It's worth mentioning that, although I think many people would think of the Harry Potter books as an original concept, Jane Yolen -- I think it was Jane Yolen, anyway -- wrote a book about a young misfit attending a wizarding school years before. So it's not all in the bare concept. It's what you bring to it that's yours.

On a similar topic, I hear sometimes about people who don't read in the genres they write in, because they want to be original and "don't want to be influenced," which is, to my thinking, asinine to the highest degree. More likely, if you follow that course, you're going to write something only _you_ think is original because you're so unaware of what's already been done that you don't even realize you're doing something that's been done a hundred times before. I feel that the more you put in, the broader scope you have of what can be played around with, and though it may seem paradoxical, by exposing yourself to as much of what's out there as possible, you wind up with a better chance of being able to make something truly yours. (Let's face it, no writer exists in a vacuum, and you can never escape influence entirely. Besides, if you want to write in a particular genre, you'd think you'd like it enough to want to read in it as well, but that's probably another topic.)


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## GraemeLion (Dec 18, 2009)

Well, fundamentally there is no difference between Analog, F&SF , and Heat.  They all have editors, they all have slush piles, and they all likely publish a scant of the stories they receive.  The odds are a little better in Heat, but the pay is dramatically different.  About the only true differences between the three are readership, market, and pay.   But even then, it is still the same process that writers go through trying to move their work.  That's why I mentioned the three in the same vein.

Now, as for truly original, no, most editors in markets don't want "truly original."  They want what they and their readership are comfortable with.  They may LIKE edgy, but they want what they know is commercially viable for their magazines.  I've spent the past three months reading five years worth of Analog.  Trust me, "The Same, But Different" is true for them.  They'll try something unique once or twice a year, but nothing that really pushes the envelope, and certainly not in anything larger than 2000-4000 words.  The envelope pushing rock hard sci-fi has its own set of magazines. (If they can be called magazines, since the USPS considers them mailable anthologies, but I digress.)

Yes, you are right about Campbell inventing the Hero's Journey, and of course you are right about the concept of it being used piece-mail by Lucas.  You forget, though, hack that he was, he did it with Campbell's blessing.  They were good friends.  You may disagree with Lucas as a writer, God knows in Star Wars I prefer Zahn and Stackpole, but he did do what he did with permission and blessing.

Do not get me wrong. 

I love original stories with unique premises, characters, and goals.  I do.   But a simple look at the NYT best seller list shows you that you and I are in a small minority in that regard.


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## Poetigress (Dec 18, 2009)

GraemeLion said:


> Well, fundamentally there is no difference between Analog, F&SF , and Heat.  They all have editors, they all have slush piles, and they all likely publish a scant of the stories they receive.  The odds are a little better in Heat, but the pay is dramatically different.  About the only true differences between the three are readership, market, and pay.   But even then, it is still the same process that writers go through trying to move their work.  That's why I mentioned the three in the same vein.



*nods* I understand what you're getting at. I was just being facetious. 

And yes, I would bet good money that (assuming a competent story), the odds are far better of getting into Heat.


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## foozzzball (Dec 18, 2009)

Okay, PT may actually be right about me being hard on Young Adult. Probably my own bad luck - the majority of YA books I run across/hear of tend to be _awful_. (Maybe I just have an ear for terrible things and forget everything nice...)

As for Analog, trust me, they don't get nearly as much 'unique' material as you think they do. 'Rock-Hard Sci-Fi' is not unique, it's a subgenre - I was recently reading this thing where buggy stone age aliens construct the theory of relativity from first principles. 

Remember Sturgeon's Law here - 90% of everything's crap.

Go read The Hero With A Thousand Faces, too. That's a _great_ example of Sturgeon's Law! (Yes, total chip on the shoulder.)


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## Poetigress (Dec 18, 2009)

foozzzball said:


> Probably my own bad luck - the majority of YA books I run across/hear of tend to be _awful_.



In my experience, it's generally better to opine on what you actually read, instead of what you run across or hear of.


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## Atrak (Dec 18, 2009)

GraemeLion said:


> This comes down to what one author mentioned in a book I'm reading. If you look at the markets that are available for sale, like Analog, F&SF, Heat, Etc., the editors have a very specific set of circumstances that make a story "good or bad."
> 
> So they are, essentially, looking for "The same, but different." They want stories that feel the same. But they want different stories.
> 
> ...


 



Poetigress said:


> Um, no, they don't. Your argument might hold water if the entire publishing process were run by teenagers, but a YA manuscript still has to appeal to the editors, bookstore buyers, book reviewers, librarians, teachers, etc., who are all adults and have read quite a bit. If it seems like YA can be full of "the same old tired stuff," I think it's no more so than any other reading range or genre, where trends get started and followed until they burn out.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



So basically my sig. True originality is...not impossible, but veeeeeeeeeeerrrryyy unlikely. Seriously, if I hadn't trained  myself to not call anything impossible, I'd say it here. We get our ideas from our memories, which our subconscious combines together to form something 'new.' Not a single idea or invention man has ever made was 'original.'

Fire? They saw lighting hit a tree and it caught fire. The wheel? Rocks rolling down a hill go faster when round, whether than square. The cotton gin? Slaves picking the seeds out by hand. Hot-air balloons? Many possibilities for that one: smoke, dandelion seeds floating in the wind, feathers in hot air, etc.

Nothing humans have made, are making, or will make will ever be original (probably  ). The best we can do is take our personal experiences and change something to make it our own, to make it Inimically Mimical.

THAT is how we move forward, how we advance.


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## Rsyk (Dec 18, 2009)

Well, seems like this thread actually started going somewhere.  And thanks to it, my ideas are kinda moving along as well. Still pretty abstract, but I've got a few characters and a general plotline now. The only problem is they've brought with them some massive holes...And the problem of making a story that's fantasy, but...not. :neutral:

To be honest, this got much more involved than I thought it would. I was really just asking at what point do you stop reading a story because you think, "This is just like..."
But, your opinions are appreciated. And very entertaining to read through.


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## Atrak (Dec 18, 2009)

Rsyk said:


> And the problem of making a story that's fantasy, but...not. :neutral:



Elaborate please.


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## Rsyk (Dec 18, 2009)

Well, most of the characters in the story are anthro, and it does play a significant part in developing their character and perceptions. That's not the problem I'm having. The thing is, I have one character whose completely human, and I'm trying to figure out how to fit him in there in a way that makes sense. 

There aren't going to be very many humans in this particular universe, so I'm trying to find a reasonable explanation for why that is. I suppose I could go with some sort of mass transformation/genocide/disappearance, but I really don't want to go into anything that becomes sci-fi or magic oriented...


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## GraemeLion (Dec 18, 2009)

I wouldn't ever try to shoe horn a character into a setting that they wouldn't fit into.  It might give the appearance of Deus Ex Machina to just contrive a complex reason.


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## PheonixStar (Dec 18, 2009)

Rsyk said:


> Well, most of the characters in the story are anthro, and it does play a significant part in developing their character and perceptions. That's not the problem I'm having. The thing is, I have one character whose completely human, and I'm trying to figure out how to fit him in there in a way that makes sense.
> 
> There aren't going to be very many humans in this particular universe, so I'm trying to find a reasonable explanation for why that is. I suppose I could go with some sort of mass transformation/genocide/disappearance, but I really don't want to go into anything that becomes sci-fi or magic oriented...


Evolution, baby!


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## Rsyk (Dec 18, 2009)

Lol. That's something that would be even more difficult. (Why would furs of every species evolve?)

Though, I suppose I could not really explain why furs are there, and instead just explain why there aren't that many humans around. Humans would have had to have done something really bad to have gotten the negative rep I'm giving them...Maybe a species war? I know it's kinda getting into the genocide territory, but it might work. Put the event in the past, like WWII, and then say that the first nuke used against humans...

Any better ideas?


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## Atrak (Dec 18, 2009)

*shrug* In my story, when I only had one human in a world of anthros, it involved science-fiction  . I suppose you could go for the 'frozen in ice for centuries' bit.


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## GraemeLion (Dec 18, 2009)

Rsyk said:


> Lol. That's something that would be even more difficult. (Why would furs of every species evolve?)
> 
> Though, I suppose I could not really explain why furs are there, and instead just explain why there aren't that many humans around. Humans would have had to have done something really bad to have gotten the negative rep I'm giving them...Maybe a species war? I know it's kinda getting into the genocide territory, but it might work. Put the event in the past, like WWII, and then say that the first nuke used against humans...
> 
> Any better ideas?



Might I really suggest that you not do hte "humans are evil" schtick?   It's an automatic turnoff for me and many other readers.  

As for what he's doing there, you could just leave out the explanation and drop little hints a la Calvin's "Noodle Incident."

He could be, if this is sci-fi enough, a time traveler.  He could be cryogenically frozen.  

But please, I'm quite nearly begging here.. don't do the "humans as evil , furries as good" routine.  It really is something that I see too much of from furries outside of fiction, and it's not the kind of thing I like to read.


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## Rsyk (Dec 18, 2009)

GraemeLion said:


> Might I really suggest that you not do hte "humans are evil" schtick?   It's an automatic turnoff for me and many other readers.
> 
> As for what he's doing there, you could just leave out the explanation and drop little hints a la Calvin's "Noodle Incident."
> 
> ...



Well, I wasn't really trying to go that direction anyway. The point I was going to try to make with the character was that he doesn't fulfill any of the stereotypes that furries have about humans. Instead of the violent, narcissistic image everyone has of him, he's an incredibly shy, socially insecure, mess of a kid. The introductory stories would tell you how he got that way, and how he gets better. So, the negative image actually reflects back more on the furries...
But if it's been that overdone, maybe I ought to try something else...

And, I time traveler's a little to sc-fi. Cryofreeze is a possibility though.


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## M. LeRenard (Dec 18, 2009)

Well, you should ask yourself what your world is like, and what it would allow.  If it's a medieval setting, for example, cryonics is not going to fly with a lot of people (it'll sound like you're making excuses).  The important thing in such a case is to keep everything 100% coherent.
As for genre crossing, it seems to me that that's becoming more popular as time goes on.  There's even a fancy new term for it: "interstitial writing."


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## Scarborough (Dec 18, 2009)

I don't think originality has to do as much with your story as it has to do with delivery.

Here's two authors' takes about getting punched in the face:



> And when I came home with from my first fight with a black eye, they were crookedly, awkwardly proud, because I had taken the punch for a good reason, catching a fist high on my right cheekbone so that a small slender girl wearing a few too many rainbows wouldnâ€™t catch it square in the face. Iâ€™m built to take blows, tall and broad, and my mother taught me how to fight, and my father taught me how to get through pain. I hit the boy back, and I hit him so he wouldnâ€™t forget it, not ever â€“ but I hit him where it wouldnâ€™t show, because when it came to his word against mine, I wanted mine to be stronger. And black eyes are awfully persuasive on a girl. My hair was long enough then, and when we were called up I borrowed a skirt, and I walked away without a shred of blame on my broad shoulders. I was fiercely proud of myself; as I strode from the deanâ€™s office I felt like every step took me twenty feet forward.





> When Dean brought his fist down on the furry's head, it made a dull noise like bricks being dropped on a dirt road. Henry thought of the possible concussions that the furry might have, delineated the certain synapses that would cease function and the possible bruising caused from blood vessels being destroyed and the blood leaking around the cranial cavity (was that what it was called? The area around the skull) and the damage to the CNS, specifically possible spinal injuries, which injuries could cause spinal fluid to run up into his cranial cavity and cause even more massive damage. The thought of so many fluids running up the furry's neck into his brain made Henry more than a little uncomfortable. He vomited. That is, Dean was sitting on top of the furry with his head bent over the furry's head and Henry vomited on Dean's head. Which, some vomit droplets dripped onto the furry's face, but the furry seemed mostly dazed and like he didn't care and was just in a lot of general pain.



Essentially, the same thing is happening. Somebody is getting punched in the face. And in high school, for both examples. But they feel completely different because of their deliveries.

Delivery can't make up the whole story, but that's what makes one story stand out from another one, right?


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## PheonixStar (Dec 18, 2009)

I guess the questions I have would be thus:

Is this a future Earth or your own world?

Is it a current Earth and all of a sudden there are furries everywhere?

If it's your own world, you don't have to explain it nearly as much as if it's Earth. Due to prejudice, humans are rare. Or humans' reproductive freedom is curtailed by the Furry govt. Or if he's the ONLY one, then his family could have been on vacation when The Big Killoff happened, and his family died during a winter or something. So he was all that was left, and someone NOT prejudiced took him in and hid and helped him or some such.

If it's Earth, you have little besides Sci Fi to turn to.


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## Rsyk (Dec 18, 2009)

Scarborough said:


> I don't think originality has to do as much with your story as it has to do with delivery.



Actually, I asked the question because when I posted the thread, my original idea was much different than it is now. Now, I really am just trying to get some answers on how to present it. 

@Phoenix

Well, it's Earth-like, but the history is completely different, so you could say it's my own world. I decided to make it so that furries had always existed, just to skip the whole "how did they get here," question. That brings you into magic and sci-fi, which I really didn't want to start out with when writing anthro. I do enough of that with transformation.

All right, so here's what I got so far.

-Setting
The setting is a world of my own creation, that has developed fairly similar to ours. The most obvious deviations are in the presence of furries, who form the majority of the population, and an interspecies war that occured around twenty years prior to the stories timeframe. This war, which was raged between furries and humans, left the human population severly damaged, (down to about 5% of the world) and furries with an extremely negative perception of humans. The timeframe of the story is slightly ahead of the present day, so there isn't going to be anything that would really qualify as sci-fi. The actual setting is one of the more prominent cities of the world, a place similar to New York or Atlanta.

-Characters

I haven't mentioned any but one, but here are some of my outlines.

Troy- Troy is the one human that's going to feature prominently in the series, his story is going to be the introduction to the world he's in. He was born after the war, and was raised with his parents for a time, until they "vanished," around the time he was ten. Troy became a vagabond afterwords, and lived on the streets till his present age of sixteen. Due to anti-human sentiment, he's learned to disguise himself using various clothes he's collected over the years. (Many people mistake him for a mouse or small reptile anthro.) He's an incredibly bright kid, but is intensely shy and borderline laconic. He'll first be introduced while he's pursuing parkour, a hobby he shares with another main character. It's also worth mentioning that he has a very severe fear of blood.

Robert- A wolf anthro, though I'm not sure of what kind. He'll be the centerpoint of most of the stories, along with Troy, mostly because the characters are so contrasting. Robert is very social, of average intelligence, and has always had things pretty good. His family will aslo feature prominently. His mom's a policewoman, his dad owns a restaraunt, and his sister is in college. (She's also an anti-human.)

Ernest-Originally a comic relief character, though I liked the idea behind him so he's going to be more than that. Ernest belongs to a family of black sewer rat anthro's, all of which are in a sewage business of some sort. (I'm going to leave that vague until I can figure out exactly what it is they'll do.) Ernest is completely different from his family in that he's albino, and has severe OCD and germophobia. (I only made him albino because I know how hard it is to keep white shirts clean, figured white fur would be worse.)

Oh, and sorry for the long post time. I had to eat.


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## Atrak (Dec 18, 2009)

M. Le Renard said:


> As for genre crossing, it seems to me that that's becoming more popular as time goes on.  There's even a fancy new term for it: "interstitial writing."



I'm an interstitial writer  .


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## Rsyk (Dec 18, 2009)

M. Le Renard said:


> As for genre crossing, it seems to me that that's becoming more popular as time goes on.  There's even a fancy new term for it: "interstitial writing."



Interstitial...
That's an interesting word.


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## nybx4life (Dec 19, 2009)

Rsyk said:


> Well, I wasn't really trying to go that direction anyway. The point I was going to try to make with the character was that he doesn't fulfill any of the stereotypes that furries have about humans. Instead of the violent, narcissistic image everyone has of him, he's an incredibly shy, socially insecure, mess of a kid. The introductory stories would tell you how he got that way, and how he gets better. So, the negative image actually reflects back more on the furries...


Sounds familiar to "Daria" (not even sure if I got the name right). It might've been done, but not to a point that I have heard of. Go with it.



M. Le Renard said:


> As for genre crossing, it seems to me that that's becoming more popular as time goes on.  There's even a fancy new term for it: "interstitial writing."



Genre crossing has become more popular, but not only in literary terms. Have you heard some of these songs that come out on radio these days? If you vary your radio stations, you might know what I mean.


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## Altamont (Dec 20, 2009)

This topic is really relevant to me, because I just saw (and fell madly in love with) Jame's Cameron's Avatar last night, and I'd have to say that originality is a hard thing to define.

Take avatar for example. Almost every critic finds their main point of derision in the fact that Avatar's story is very predictable, a point with which I would have to agree; it is essentially Pocahontas in Space.

But throughout the film I found I did not care one bit that the story was predictable, because it was told so damn _well_ that I was immersed and affected all the same.

The same can apply to all stories, I think; now, of course original ideas are still very important. No one I think is going to be respected by writing another story about say, a teenage wizard at school who must defeat a dark lord.

But let's be honest. After thousands of years of a culture of storytelling, some ideas _will_ be repeated. Classic revenge tales, coming of age road trips, love triangle shenanigans, and yes the classic case of an enemy coming to defend what he initially set out to destroy. These basic ideas and themes permeate all cultures and are communicated through atwork every day. So will we se them repeated in varying forms of work? Of course. Will they be denounced as either incredibly derivative (What Happens in Vegas) or a masterpiece (Star Wars, Avatar, etc).

So, in my opinion, the repetition of various story beats and ideas is inevitable. But as long as it's told _well_...

Count me in.

P.S.

Avatar is absolutely incredible. I recommend that you all see it ASAP, and in 3D as well. Absolutely stunning picture.


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## Rsyk (Dec 20, 2009)

Altamont said:


> This topic is really relevant to me, because I just saw (and fell madly in love with) Jame's Cameron's Avatar last night, and I'd have to say that originality is a hard thing to define.
> 
> Take avatar for example. Almost every critic finds their main point of derision in the fact that Avatar's story is very predictable, a point with which I would have to agree; it is essentially Pocahontas in Space.
> 
> ...


I plan to see Avatar eventually. Knowing me though, it'll probably be much later than I should.

Thanks for all the help everyone. I've already started working on it, though I can say it'll be slow going. Don't expect anything for a while. (As if anyone cared, lol.)


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## Atrak (Dec 20, 2009)

Rsyk said:


> I plan to see Avatar eventually. Knowing me though, it'll probably be much later than I should.
> 
> Thanks for all the help everyone. I've already started working on it, though I can say it'll be slow going. Don't expect anything for a while. (As if anyone cared, lol.)



I care, just because you said that  .


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## Murphy Z (Dec 23, 2009)

Here's a few more problems with the concept of originality in writing:

About 99% of the words you use in the story have been used thousands of times. Likewise, you're probably writing a plotline, etc. that's been used hundreds of times before.

Unless you copied and pasted another story (shame, shame!), your work won't be exactly like anyone else's.

So, it's nearly impossible to be totally (un-)original.

It's also hard to pin down originality because nobody has read everything. Also it could be sort of "local," especially in terms of online sites. You could go to one site and it could be unique there, but go to another and there's 20 like it. 

Also the perception of originality (or lack thereof), can be put in the terms of the time. If you put out a midwestern court drama when there are 20 or 30 out there, it won't be seen as original, but wait 30 years, and you put it out, and it's the only one currently out, people will see it as more original (because most won't have read the one 30 years ago) 

And originality is just one aspect of the story, so of course enjoyment and quality of the story shouldn't be based just on that. A story can be original and be self-indulgent, hard to understand, implausible, overly zany, too alien, remote, without a center, too detached from reality, etc. Special conswiderations have to be taken when writing an "original" story.

And like any other story, it can be subject to the reader's taste. Some people like more "out there" stuff than other people.  

If I read the back cover blurbs of "hip" fiction, it's also important that the author be some combination of two or more previous good authors and "have a style all their own." Sometimes it's "if [author A] and [author B] had a baby" or "co-authored a book" or "got their genes" spliced or whatever. I don't know if the authors actually try and do this or the blurb-meister only guesses.


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## Thou Dog (Dec 23, 2009)

foozzzball said:


> All stories are the same, there is no originality, etc etc etc.
> 
> If you fail to write an original story I tend not to read it. Originality in this context is doing something different to what I have come across before. Young Adult authors get a free ride and get to churn out the same old tired stuff because young adults haven't read much.
> 
> I just recently had this problem when confronted with the SF section at my local bookstore - they were mostly, from the looks of it, rewriting books I'd read before. Why yes, the end of the world as confronted by plucky hero is a pretty broad concept, lots to work with there, but I'm a little tired of stories bound to that right now, thanks...


My suggestion for anyone tired of apocalyptic science fiction is to read "Wanderer", by Fritz Lieber. Same old basic theme, but the window-dressing is startlingly new (and well-written).


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