In writing, you’ve always got to strike a balance between things that the readers find familiar and things that might be original or new to them. Every genre has its own standard set of tropes, plot twists, character archetypes, and other such story elements, and even if the readers can’t explain them all to you, they know them well enough to tell when something is off.
Different genres strike different balances between the original and the familiar. Romance tends to lean more toward the familiar, with happily-ever-after (or happy-for-now) endings a fairly ironclad rule. Fantasy tends to have a little more originality, depending on the subgenre, but there’s still a host of familiar tropes and world-building elements that you can usually expect to find. Anime tends to go pretty crazy with the original elements, but even in a wacky show like Hetalia there are still a bunch of anime-specific tropes that ground the story in a degree of familiarity.
A great way to introduce originality is to pull a common trope or story element from a different genre and adapt it to a genre in which the readers are much less familiar with it. This is what Suzanne Collins did with The Hunger Games: she borrowed elements from suspense and thriller, and combined them in a novel that was solidly grounded in YA. As much as I hated the book, I have to admit she did a very good job blending those elements into another genre.
So combining familiar elements in unfamiliar ways is one way to create originality. But another way–and potentially a much more risky way–is to throw in something that the reader has probably never seen before.
I don’t know why, but as a writer I seem to be drawn to these stories–much more so than I’m drawn to them as a reader. As an example, when I wrote Star Wanderers, this weird polygamy element got woven in, with the best friend of the female protagonist trying to convince her to share her husband. I have never read a story where anything like that happened, but that was where the story wanted to take me, so I followed it as best as I could.
The danger in throwing in something that is so far outside the realm of familiarity is that the readers will go “WTF?” and get thrown right out of the story. With Star Wanderers, I tried to do my best to develop the characters and convey their motivations in order for it all to make sense, but it was still really hard to write because I didn’t know if the polygamy thing was something that they’d swallow. And when you’re worried how the readers are going to respond to you story, it can be very hard to write it.
I suppose I should give more credit to my readers, though. Their experience is probably a lot broader than I think it is, and their hunger for strange new experiences may actually be stronger than I can ever fulfill. With Star Wanderers, I got a handful of reviews saying that I should have taken the polygamy thing further, or that I should have paired up characters in ways that I’d never even considered. I’m sure there were others who were disgusted by the whole thing, but the books are still selling, so it’s clear that I didn’t alienate everyone.
Right now, I’m writing Strangers in Flight (Brothers in Exile: Book III), and I’ve got another element in there that you don’t really see very often in any genre–at least, not in the way I’ve chosen to play it. It flirts with the taboo a bit and I’m sure it will make some people uncomfortable, though probably not as uncomfortable as it will make me to know that people are actually reading it.
For that reason, writing this book has put me in a weird mental headspace that’s making it very difficult to finish the thing, no matter how many deadlines I give myself. I’m still going to write it, and unless an unforeseen disaster happens I’ll finish it in time to publish it before the end of the summer, but it won’t be easy.
That said, this is a really fun story. Aside from all my fears about how readers are going to respond to it, I’m having a blast writing it. So maybe I should just put that other stuff out of my mind and focus on what I enjoy about the story. Because if I enjoy the story, then you probably will too.
