Today, for their Road Trip Wednesday question for bloggers, YA Highway asked: What story ideas have you trunked because they were too similar to published/well-known stories?
I’m lucky here in that I think the answer is… none. Like every other writer out there, I’m inspired by elements in other stories (and art/music/film/TV) when creating my own, but when all these different sources of inspiration come together my ideas end up very different to existing stories.
But, on the more unfortunate side of things, my stories tend to fall into ‘over-saturated’ markets and genres. Nothing to do with the actual writing or story, just the genre label. That’s always frustrating.
What did you choose for your response? Drop a link to your answer in the comments!
The over-saturated market thing is definitely frustrating. My current WiP is mostly sci fi, but kind of straddles the dystopian line too. Have to be careful with that one because it’s the flavour of the moment and rapidly becoming ‘been done’. Nice that you haven’t had to trunk stories because of similarities with others :-)
Good for you that you haven’t experienced this yet! It’s not fun, believe me. I feel for you on the oversaturated markets, though. I’m just glad ‘fantasy’ is such a broad one.
I had this trouble with a character concept. The story was heavily inspired by Labyrinth, but the character design ended up being something already done by Neil Gaiman! (It really made me wonder if he was inspired by Labyrinth too.)
http://dverted.blogspot.com/2012/02/rtw-your-dream-is-my-wish.html
I think it can be tough to predict what the market will bear, especially from an outside perspective, but writing what you love will never be a bad thing. Even if a genre or concept has already been done to death, who is to say that the trend won’t crop up again in the future? Then you’ll have a shiny, pretty MS to submit right when the trend is hot!
I would bet that even vampires will see a resurgence at some point. Maybe not soon, but some day.
Unfortunately, our best ideas don’t always correspond to what the market wants. Do we write to market trends, or write the stories we want to write? While some may be blessed with always writing marketable stories, I generally stick with the latter regardless.