Assignment 6 YKK

1) Story tropes: an effective/good thing or bad thing to have repeat stories, characters, plots, etc.? Is total originality possible in terms of story elements?

2) If you could be any animal in the world, which one? Why?

3) Which genre of book is the best? Why?

1) Even as I was trying to think up prompts for this blog post I couldn’t really think of much. (As you might be able to notice in 2. and 3.) Even when I’m trying to finish my own book it’s easy to start off typing with a high to only slam into the first roadblock a couple minutes later. Am I good enough? Am I creative enough? The motivation to write mostly comes from the books you couldn’t pull your head out of even when your mother called you to dinner. It's natural to try and emulate them exactly - because they work and they're true.

I also feel like that's why a lot of these latest dystopians sound so flat. How come they sound like the last three books we’ve read? Because there's a tried and true formula the authors used. There's nothing wrong with that. The existence of real originality in creating stories is impossible. You can’t really think of a totally new main character - the main character has to fulfill a certain thirst in the reader, and if he’s not relatable or likable to most of the target audience, it’s also probable that story won’t become a bestseller. So he or she has to, in the end, become a certain person within a certain storyline. The chosen hero. The confused person stuck in the midst of a magical world. The total stranger or a familiar nobody. Then how do people create "original" stories? If complete originality is impossible, then there is bound to be part of a trope everywhere. Part of the secret to it is twisting it into a broadly familiar but different form, a more real form.

I often rant to my friends or my parents about a book I’d recently read, often saying how disappointed with it I was, how similar and dull and banal and hackneyed and trite (I know there are other vocab words eluding me right now) it was to some other piece I'd read earlier. But yet I enjoy those books to a certain level - they’ll elicit emotion, they’ll have me thinking about that story for days. It could be that I’m just too gullible of a person. Still, like me, there are audiences who will gobble up the similar candy in a different wrapper (snickers, milky ways, etc..can't really tell the difference between them all). Some will buy the same kind again and again. They are the ones that are the first and best of their kind, the ones that touch more than they don't, like chocolate.

Although it's also probably impossible to fulfill the imagination, will the reservoir of "original" ideas or forms shrink? I don't know.