Where's the middle ground between genre conventions and originality?
I've long been interested in writing a fantasy novel. Over the countless iterations I've gone through, one thing has remained clear: a quest for originality.
I know some people like the fantasy cliches, but a good chunk don't. These people want imagination, creativity, and originality. They don't want to meet an 'elf' and instantly know that it's a super-strong super-fast super-agile magic-wielding likely-vegetarian nature-lover with pointed ears. And I'm with them.
I have ever since been making my fantasy novel more and more 'original' by going against what might be expected. At first I had elves. But they often tripped and face-planted with everyone else. Then I made them super weak. Recently, I've decided that the very idea of elves is in fact a genre convention, and I have eliminated them entirely. The novel is now centered on humans. I went further. Humans are the only sentient race. There are no elves, dwarves, goblins, or any of the other expected races.
In fact, the only thing keeping the novel as fantasy at all is that it is set on a different planet, a lack of modern technology, and the humans use magic.
All of that is just an example. My question is, if I intentionally go against the genre conventions - for any genre, not just fantasy - where do I draw the line?
There has to be a middle ground somewhere. On one side of the spectrum you have knights, elves, magic, dragons, different species, and so on. Go completely original and you get something really weird, like telepathic super-platypuses swimming in the molten oceans of a lava world.
How do you know when you need more originality, or when you need more convention?
Edit for future viewers: I've marked the answer by Chris, because it explain the theory behind my question and its solution. I would however like to direct future viewers to Sara Costa's answer as well, because it creates - at least to me - a very clear line, and an easy way to tell how much is too much in terms of originality vs genre conventions.
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Originality isn't contained merely in what populates your fantasy world. In fact, I'd say that's one of the least important elements to an original story. You can have a new, fresh, original story in a setting with the old tired elves, dwarves and orcs (look at JourneyQuest, for example), and you can have an old, predictable story in a world populated by nothing out of the old bestiary.
Originality can and should come in the plot itself: what happens, why, how, the way your characters think, the way they interact, the way they respond to situations.
Take, for instance M.R. Carey's "The Girl with all the Gifts". In terms of what populates his world, you've got the standard zombie apocalypse, with the experienced soldier, and the inexperienced rookie, and some civilians, and zombies. What makes this book stand out is the main character: a bright, intelligent, kind girl,
who is a zombie.
So you can have elves, they can be pointy-eared, they can even be vegetarian if you like. The question is how you use them. What's new about the story you're telling - that's the important part.
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You know when you are going against the conventions too much when you are feeling forced to go against the conventions just for the sake of going against the conventions.
The work then starts to feel like hard work to not be like everyone else instead of putting the effort into meaningful progression of the plot and working on the character traits of your main characters. It starts to feel important to come up with new names, just for the sake of not using known names.
There is a nice chart from XKCD - Fiction Rule of Thumb that shows how the amount of invented words makes the book likely worse.
It becomes hard to read because you needed original names in a language noone has ever heard of and with a lot of apostrophes as if they were Eldritch Horrors in a game of D&D instead of being easy to read because you spent your time making the dialogue flow in a way that feels natural.
It's good to try to go against a few genre rules, but in general the general audience expects the general rules of a fantasy book.
There are different degrees of fantasy of course - you have the knight in shining armor fighting together with the rogue and the wizard against the dragon. Or you have the modern day police force that has help from a single rare individual when it comes to tracking the bunch of assassins that can get somewhere without opening a door or window because magic. But when you want to write about a knight in shining armor and you are forcing him to be a detective you will get a bad book - it's not the story you have in your head because you always have to twist what is in your head just because you don't want to say the word elf.
Most people don't have a problem with unusual characteristics like elves being normal-speed and without magic. Maybe a bit longer living and a bit more peaceful, but more than willing to fight for something they want. Just define your version of elves by showing the reader what is different about these elves. They will expect a few similarities, but it doesn't have to be the complete clichè.
If you feel that you need to make sure that your readers know that these elves are different you could for example change their name slightly - calling them elffes would go a long way in showing how they are very similar, but not quite normal elves. Or you could call magic magik or magick. This has been done before, but it's basically a symbol for "this is a different kind of magic with its own rules, not the D&D-style Sword-and-Sorcery kind". As long as you don't do this with every single race or magic spell or whatever you want to paint differently it wouldn't be considered bad writing, just your personal style.
If you are trying too hard to get something original you will never finish anything - someone has used that word you just wanted to write down before after all...
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Stories are inhabited by archetypes. That does not seem to be a choice. It seems to be what the human psyche craves.
One has to ask, after all, why we like stories at all. We can suggest some practical purposes that stories serve, but for the most part they are simply entertainments, and it is very clear that certain sorts of stories work consistently. People don't tire of the same story over and over again. So there is something in us that is quite specific which craves a very particular kind of narrative which we call a story. There is no scope for originality here. The architecture of story is written on the human heart.
When we seek to describe the architecture of story, the successful explanations all seem to come back to archetypes. So, a knight is not just a guy on a horse with a tin suit. A knight is an archetypal hero. The Lone Ranger is a knight. James Bond is a knight. If you write a quest story, your hero is a knight. He may start out a bank manager, but he will have to pretty quickly find his inner knight or the story is going nowhere.
So, the standard Tolkienesque cast of beasties are simply one way of embodying the archetypes. There seems to be an endless appetite for this embodiment of the archetypes, but if you are tired of writing it, then you can certainly embody them differently, but you still need the same archetypes, because stories are populated by archetypes.
There are, of course, different embodiments of the same archetypes in different genres. The cowboy is a knight. The hard boiled detective is a knight. The bold sea captain is a knight. Captain America and Iron Man are knights. If you can figure out a new way to embody the knight, and the wizard, and the maiden, and the crone, and the trickster, you could be onto something good.
But there is a problem with creating a different embodiment of the archetypes. People will not be able to instantly recognize the archetypes when they see them. This means you have to spend time demonstrating that they are the archetypes so that people will recognize them in your story. There is nothing wrong with this. Authors of mainstream fiction do this all the time. But there is a reason that genre fiction embodies their archetypes the same way each time. It is so that the reader can instantly recognize the archetypes the moment they show up, allowing you to get straight to the action. For the impatient reader of popcorn fiction, this is important.
If your attempt at originality takes you away from the archetypes altogether, you are going to lose most of your audience, if not all of it. If your attempt at originality takes the form of embodying the archetypes in a new way, you may lose some of your audience, and you might be appealing to an audience outside the traditional audience of the genre you are writing in. (Note that a lot of mainstream and literary fiction takes the form of mystery, sic fi, fantasy, romance, or even western, but is not shelved with them because it does not fit with the conventions of those genres.)
Does this leave room for originality? I believe it does, but it is originality in other parts of the craft. Originality in diction, or in characterization, or in pacing and form are all possible, though originality should not be understood as doing something just because no one else is doing it. True originality means coming up with something that actually works, and that is no mean feat.
In the end, originality is not a virtue in itself in a novelist. The core virtue of a novelist is the acuity of their vision and the vividness with which they transmit that vision. If they are original it is because they needed to find a new way to express what they have seen. Innovation in the arts is the daughter of vision. Focus on refining your vision and on capturing and transmitting your vision and if innovation is required to accomplish that, it will take care of itself.
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