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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25326
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25326
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Fiction is based on observation, not invention. The same stories are told over and over again because the same stories are lived over and over again. If new writers repeat the stories of old writers it is not because they copied them from the old writers, but because both the old writer and the new observed the same stories playing out in the lives of the people around them.

The writer's job is to refine and highlight the key points of story. If a story works for you it works through recall. A good writer makes you see the world more vividly. Having seen the world more vividly, you are better prepared to write yourself. Your debt to the writers you have read is not that you steal their invention but that their observation has sharpened your own.

We endlessly retell the old stories because those are the stories there are, and because there is apparently an endless appetite for the old stories told in new ways. What we prize is not the great inventors of stories (for there are none). What we prize is the great tellers of stories. Take the oldest, most trite, most obvious story in the world and tell it with extraordinary verve, sympathy, and insight, and the world will beat a path to your door.

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