Borrowing plots

As writers, we tend to beat ourselves up about finding original plots for our stories, but the truth is that most of them are borrowed from other work.

Think about the romance novel.  The plot couldn't be simpler.  Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end.  Or the gender reversal of that.  Either way, there's nothing new about that plot.  It's been done thousands of times.  So why do people still read romances?  They read them because of the way the writer has taken and shaped that plot.

It's what we do with the basic plot that matters, how we shape it and make it our own.  One of the oldest plots we know of is that of the quest.  The hero or heroine sets out on a journey to discover something.  Along the way he or she will suffer setbacks, conflicts, and will sometimes fail to get what they want.   But that doesn't matter.  The quest story is ultimately about the journey, and the way the events of the story cause the characters to change.  And it might turn out that your characters are glad they didn't get what they wanted.

However old the plot is, we can re-work it, tell an ancient fable in our present-day voice and make it new again.  The struggle between good and evil is an eternal theme, but our concepts of evil and good change over the centuries.  And seen through the eyes and voice of a hip urban noir character an ancient tale feels very different.

The end of The Hero's Journey is the return home, but unlike in old fairy tales, the characters might not live happily ever after.  At the end of The Lord of the Rings our brave hobbits return to The Shire to find that Saruman has turned it into an industrial wasteland.  The struggle is not yet over.

If we're looking for a new angle on an old plot we could turn it over to our subconscious to work on.  The logic-brain likes to keep control of our plots, but if we relax and have the confidence to let our subconscious guide us it can surprise us with startling new combinations of old ideas.

How we write about the quest or the struggle between good and evil, how we change our characters after their journey, is what makes our stories unique.  We can take the oldest plot in the world, stamp it with our unique storytelling skills, and produce something startlingly new.