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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34660
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34660
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are no new ideas. Everything has been done. Every plot device has been used a thousand times. Whatever you write it will use ideas that other writers have already used many times over.

Plagiarism is representing someone else's work as your own. It is not using ideas that have been used before. If it were that, literature would have come to an end eons ago.

What sets one story apart from another is not the ideas in the story or the shape of the story (it is well said that there are only seven plots in fiction) but the individual and specific telling of the story.

The basic girl meets boy, girl scorns boy, girl discovers boy is good egg after all, girl discovers other girl figured this out already, girl wins boy over because they are destined to be soulmates story is told thousands of times, with production on an industrial scale. There is a large group of readers who will consume 50 or 100 versions of that story a year. But each telling of that story has to be particular in its details and the way it is told.

There are no new story ideas left to tell, but there are an infinite number of ways to tell the old stories again. Focus on creating a unique and compelling telling of whichever old stories you choose to tell again.

Original score: 5