Quote:
Originally Posted by EluThingol
Surely people try to emulate what they like, or what was successful. But like someone else said, much of what Tolkien wrote was borrowed from something else.
There is a saying "No Idea is original". And it's true.
You can make a cake, but did u invent the batter, the oven, the frosting, the recipe? ANY of it? probably not. You are going to do it the same way with the same stuff, just like everyone else did before you and everyone else did after.
Your mission though, is to make it more delicious, or at least, different and memorable.
That being said, it doesn't matter how much rip-off there seems to be in a writing, especially within our beloved fantasy genre.
If you want to find something new, fresh, strange, un-done, its your responsibility to go out searching for it. The writers of unique and groundbreaking things are hidden away in obscurity because people publish mostly what is recognizable, relatable and profitable to the majority.
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I can sympathize with this. Playing with the cooking metaphor, in my youth the primary ingredient in icing was sugar. Lately, I've been encountering icing that seems centered on whipped cream. I don't know that this was really a recent innovation, or whether the cooks in my family just recently discovered it, but it is really neat either way to break out of one tradition and embrace another.
Cyberpunk and Steampunk are in my lifetime examples of new generas that grew out of a few authors sufficiently breaking molds to create a new pattern and a new market. It is not at all common to write a book that is innovative enough and popular enough that one gets copied sufficiently often to create a new genera. It isn't easily done. I wouldn't suggest that a writer seek to deliberately do it. You just write you best books and maybe it will happen. I will be tempted to applaud when it is done.
Far more writers or artists of all sorts will work within a tradition. Quite a few work within a tradition in such a way as to expand the tradition and keep it alive rather than cliched. At the same time, if one doesn't care for a particular genera, a particular tradition, then one can almost define such as a collection of cliches. The comment about ninety percent of everything might stand.
Tolkien? He borrowed from so many diverse sources that it would be hard to write fantasy without borrowing from some of the same sources. I don't know that this makes him the father of all fantasy. There is no doubt that he revitalized fantasy. He set some patterns that many have borrowed. I do see modern writers who are still playing similar games by similar rules.
JK Rowlings didn't invent fantasy. She also didn't invent the young adult plot line where the kid is sent off to boarding school and has lots of coming of age experiences. She did combine two traditions in a quite readable and sellable way. I've read em all and like them quite a bit.
If I don't give Tolkien credit for the teen age angst modern urban fantasy novels where vampires contest with werewolves... Please don't interpret this as disrespect for the Professor. I just don't see fantasy as having a single tradition.