All of us have at some point ranted about demands for surprises and twists, for “freshness” and so forth. Understandably, too – when someone is up to their eyeballs in really bad Twilight knockoffs they don’t want to look at your beautifully crafted paranormal romance with vampires because if they see another vampire, even as the bad guy, they’re going to puke.
Now sure, this afflicts editors before it hits readers, but it does eventually hit readers as well. You see the fads cycle through the system, growing exponentially on the back of the new fresh book and then fading as people look at the next one and think “Dear god, not another one.” The rise of the big publishers having absolute control over distribution warped the cycle, causing them to keep pushing a trend that should have fallen back to wait for the next cycle – which naturally “helped” the ever-shrinking sales numbers about as much as you’d expect.
And yet… when you look at what looks fresh and new and shiny, it invariably isn’t.
Take the Harry Potter series, and more specifically Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (US idiots were convinced that nobody here would know what the philosopher’s stone was so they called the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone instead. I swear, one day I’ll find a porn fanfic called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stones. Um. Sorry. Forgot the inside thoughts). There’s really nothing original about it – but the mix of elements it uses is unusual enough that it seemed original. The British boarding school mystery/adventure has been a staple of fiction for older kids and teens for years. The hidden world of magicians is another staple. By mixing the two with a collection of characters just enough larger than life that people could identify with them without any fear of being too much like them, Rowling had something that felt fresh.
Of course, she was also lucky – her books happened to tap into a zeitgeist that she probably wasn’t aware of at a conscious level. That kind of thing happens to an author somewhat less than once in a lifetime. Oh, yes, and she was British. The UK traditional market isn’t quite as ossified and choked as the US market, so they do occasionally have surprise bestsellers. There haven’t been any of those in the US that weren’t manufactured behind the scenes in years.
Of course this is wonderfully easy to see in retrospect, and of course this happened more than ten years ago (dear God I feel old). Now? Who knows if it could happen.
Twilight got pushed. It still had that not-precisely-fresh freshness because of the old-fashioned morality where you didn’t have the main characters falling into bed with each other at every possible opportunity. That hasn’t been part of the YA scene in long enough it felt fresh and new and surprising. (No, I am not going to discuss the newness and freshness of sparkling vampires. There are limits).
I’ll confess to wondering how to write something that had that apparent surprise freshness, before I came to the conclusion that there’s no point. Even if I was to dream up something that would work, there’s no guarantee that by the time I finished a novel in that setting (assuming characters decided to play, which for a pantser as extreme as me is no certainty) there wouldn’t have been half a dozen other books published around the same scenario. Why? All authors are tuned in to the spirit of their time to some extent. This is why there will be a bunch of independently conceived and written books that all deal with the same basic problem all coming out at the same time. It’s what happens when creative people look at the world around them and respond to what they’re seeing.
The lucky one whose book happens to be the first in that cluster and manages to catch people’s interest and is good enough and engaging enough to keep them, and is memorable enough for people to want to read the next one… That’s the one that becomes the next surprise with all the freshness and newness and sparkliness (but not in the vampires).
And it isn’t in the least surprising that it happens. The surprising thing is that it’s not happening more often.
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “The Unsurprising Surprise”
When someone (may have been my Mom, who was also my writing teacher about then) told me there were only 64 plots in the world I almost stopped trying to write, because, obviously, I could never write anything original. Now, I just try to make sure there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. No telling if that means I will ever write anything fresh, or not, but I don’t worry about it, and that frees me up to write. Now, I do need to stop being so nice to my characters, and plug in more action to move the story along. Those are things I do have to worry about.
Um… that’s way more than what I had read an author say in passing. He was talking about his own writing, and mentioned plots, and apparently when he was going to school, there was disagreement as to whether there were only 3 plots or if there were 7. He didn’t mention what the lists consisted of, however.
Yes, I came to the conclusion later on that there is much disagreement on what a plot is, and how many there are. Also, I may be remembering it badly – I think that conversation took place when I was 11. It’s been a while.
“Plot” seems to have two different meanings, for a writer. Generally the plot is the progression of the story, almost an outline. Where in the case of “Only X-number of plots” they really mean the _type_ of story.
The six basics I’ve heard:
Boy meets girls (all Romances, but can be any gender or species of strangers, actually, as in Enemy Mine or The Defiant Ones), Betrayal and Revenge (Count of Monte Cristo), Sin and Redemption, Impersonation (Prince and the Pauper, Man in the Iron Mask), Quest (Lord of the Rings), Overcoming High Odds.
IMO, that last, especially, is a real catch-all. Adventure, Military, Local Boy Does Good and so forth.
Comedy can happen in all of them, but kind of needs the framework of one of them. Tragedy, ditto.
I think the best stories combine more than one. There’s usually one dominant type, but many of the subplots are strongly of the others. Take Star Wars. It’s a straightforward adventure, overcoming high odds. Or is it the sin and redemption of Anakin Skywalker? The romance of Han and Leia? Farm boy from Tattooine becomes Heroic Jedi. Impersonation (Aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?). Comedy with the Droids. Tragic moments when characters die or All Seems Lost.
Agreed. I tend to view plot as the more detailed what happens to whom why, and the broader framework as more of a scenario thing. Of course, you talk to three writers and you’ve got a dozen definitions so… It’s not an easy thing to pin down.
Some go as broad as “man vs man”, “man vs nature”, “man vs himself”. I suppose you could classify romance as “man vs man”.
It doesn’t have to be original to feel original – and comfortable and easy to read trumps original for a reader every time.
Ya know, I get this post a lot better than I wish I did. My current WIP is “original” because I turned a fantasy world on its head. IE The evil races (orcs, goblins, dark elves) control most of the world, led by dragons, elves and dwarves are expanding into their territory and humans are either enslaved or have regressed into the Bronze Age… and the story is told primarily through the eyes of a dwarf.
Now I have to admit that it’s not really original, that the ideas are recycled tropes and that it’s probably a derivative work. I mean, I still feel like it has the potential to be an awesome story… but… DAMN.
As long as their are parts that are only you – and that could be anything.
You are unique, from why you choose this story, to how you write, to how you got to the place where you had to write.
It’s all in how you use that.
Ack! Proofread! Finish caffeine!
THERE, not their. 😦
I hear ya. I’ve been they’re!
No, no, don’t proofread. You’ll make the pros look bad. (I too am short on caffeine.)
Short on caffeine? At this time of day? Ouch.
Yes, but you obviously get taller when you’re off it. (runs)
THPPPPP.
Absolutely. Even pre-caffienated you’re right. And write, too 🙂
It doesn’t have to be original. Really. One of my favorite short stories (i.e. one that I wrote) is from the orc’s point of view, and he spends most of the time bitching about the damned heroes and how they make his life too difficult.
And the difficulty of finding clean underwear when one wants to surrender. 😛
Just because it is derivative doesn’t mean it is bad, in truth it may be much better than the original. I have never been able to read Lord of the Rings (tried several times, but always ended up finding myself cleaning the bathroom or something equally engrossing, because it bored me to tears) but have read a lot of derivative works, like E Moon’s Paksennerion books that I really liked.
I think the most unpredictable plot I’ve encountered was in an RPG by the name of the Spirit Engine 2. I think what made it so twisty was it had several major secret factions, none of which had a complete picture of what was actually going on.
Most of them reached perfectly rational conclusions based on what they knew, but because they didn’t have the whole picture, they were wrong. Throw in a couple of characters who are also crazy and you have a recipe for a really convoluted plot.
Every time you clear out a group, and find out what they “knew” it changes what the player thought was going on. Then you get to the next group, and you find out the first group didn’t have all the pieces, but now you really know what is going on, and so on and so on.
And all of this starts of with a posse of villagers tearing past, “Crazy cultists have hostages! Help us save them!”
Analyzing it with the six basics Ms. Uphof posted, the story line is one very long Quest. Each phase the party completes brings new information, and changes the nature of the quest. Some sections take on the Sin and Redemption characteristics, because some of the quest sections end up making things worse. Others have aspects of Betrayal and Revenge, when bad actors have intentionally fed the party incomplete information, to achieve certain goals.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if analyzing a plot based on the plot types is even a worthwhile exercise for an author. It just doesn’t strike me that plot archetype has any correlation between good and bad stories. I find myself wondering, what does separate the good ones from the bad ones?
What separates good stories from bad stories is how well the writer (or writers) do it. When it’s internally consistent enough, and the characters are enjoyable enough, and the plotting makes enough sense, the whole thing comes together into something that feels satisfying.
It sounds like that RPG did a very good job of plotting – which is nice to see. I’ve seen a few where the alleged plot isn’t much more than a tissue thin excuse for the killing stuff part.
Analyzing your own writing by plot types can help a writer organize the various plot threads, and remember things like, in the last chapter the romance has to come together, or who gets to kill a certain Bad Guy (the character who most wants revenge) and so forth. And where she totally failed to notice something her subconscious (and or the Characters) put something in that needs to be dealt with.