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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34664
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Originality is not a yes/no, true/false thing. There are degrees of originality.

There are lots of stories about a boy and girl who meet and fall in love. They are not all rip-offs of "Romeo and Juliet". Falling in love is part of the normal human experience.

There are lots of stories about a hero who sets off on a quest and must overcome various obstacles to reach his goal. They are not all rip-offs of "The Odyssey". Having a goal and having to overcome obstacles to achieve that goal is part of the normal human experience.

There are lots of stories out there about a brilliant detective solving crimes, couples falling in love, soldiers going to war, a family going through amusing little problems, etc.

It is very rare for an author to come up with a totally original idea. Most writing is coming up with interesting variations of an existing idea.

If you're worried that your story is just like some other author's story because your story has parallel worlds and this other story has parallel worlds ... that's very general. I wouldn't be worried about copying there at all. At the other extreme, if your story is a word-for-word copy of Harry Potter except that you changed the names of all the people and places, I'd say your originality -- coming up with new names -- is so low that you really should try something else. (Never mind that you would surely lose a copyright suit.)

Without reading your story, I can't say how original or unoriginal it is. (And I've never heard of most of the inspirations you mention, so I couldn't judge the similarity.) But the question to ask yourself is, Did I just steal somebody else's idea, or did I steal his idea and then add my own twist to it?

If -- to take something popular enough that most readers will have at least heard of it -- you too Star Wars and shuffled a few details around but basically kept the same story, boring, unoriginal. But if you changed it so that your Darth Vader character was the good guy and your Luke Skywalker was the villain, that the rebels are a bunch of evil terrorists trying to destroy civilization and the empire is trying to preserve it, you would have an original story. Whether it is good or not would depend on how well you did it.

Lots of science fiction stories take real historical events and re-tell them set in the future. To take a classic example, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is a retelling of the fall of the Roman Empire as the fall of a Galactic Empire. I don't think Asimov was ever shy about admitting that that's exactly what he was doing. He didn't see any reason to be embarrassed about copying historical events. There was a science fiction story I read many years ago (don't remember the title or the author, sorry), about an advanced alien civilization coming to Earth, and the author not only copied many elements of the story from the British colonization of Australia, but throughout the book he pointed out that he was doing this. Characters would say, "This is like when the British did such-and-such with the aborigines".

So ... try to be original. Evaluate how original you think you are being. Don't panic if you are not 100% original.

Original score: 3