No New Ideas?

Happy Belated New Year, everyone! I hope 2018 is finding each of you well!

I've already had five author events this month (no, I don't have a lot of free time!). I talk to lots of people at my events, and I happened to have two people at two of these events mention the same concern to me:

That there are no new ideas.

In the first instance, the man who mentioned this to me was worried because he'd always wanted to write a novel, but ended up reading another novel that turned out to be nearly identical to the one he'd been working on. In the second instance, the man who mentioned that there are no new ideas said that his daughter liked to write--I suppose he was concerned for her since all worthwhile ideas seem to have already been taken.

I told both of these people the same thing: there AREN'T really any new ideas.

But that's not something to be feared. The important thing to do is to put your own spin on an established idea. Make it yours, and it will feel original to your readers.

For example:

Some number of years ago, I read a short story by Oscar Wilde called "The Canterville Ghost." In this story, a loud and boisterous American family moves into a ghost's estate. The ghost doesn't like it and makes many attempts to scare the family away. Part of it was told from the ghost's point of view, which I thought was so neat that I wrote part of Rage's Echo from the ghost's point of view.

(As a side note, the movie Beetlejuice borrows heavily from Wilde's story, as it's about two ghosts trying to scare away the family who moves into their house.)

Another example is my short story "The Mirror," which appears in Ordinary Souls. If you haven't read "The Mirror" yet, it's about Elena, a wealthy divorcee, who collects antiques and discovers that her "new" antique mirror sometimes chooses to reflect her future self's reflection back at her. Elena begins to fixate on what her future self is doing--who wouldn't?--and then tries to avoid what she sees happening in the mirror.

Enchanted mirrors are by no means an original literary phenomenon! Think of the magic mirror on the wall in Snow White, or the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, which shows you your heart's deepest desire when you look into it.

via GIPHY

So, don't worry if an idea you love is already "taken." Work with the idea and shape it into something new! Just don't ever plagiarize, because THAT is illegal.

What about you, writers? How have you reworked established ideas and made them your own?