The Same Old Story
S ome people really don’t like the idea of writing the same plot over and over. They say things like, “Publishers just want to force us all into the same genre. They won’t even look at something new.” But look at how many times Cinderella has been told. There must be thousands of variations on that story. And look at the Romance genre. Forget the strict rules about what makes a book romance novel, most books in the genre follow the same plot. Two characters with problems meet. They are soon at odds with each other. But as they discover that they need each other and that they are better together than apart. But that plot isn’t limited to the Romance genre or characters who fall in love. In spite of the evidence we have a tendency to think that if we could just come up with a plot that no one has ever done before then it would shake up the literary world. People who try that end up with is a poorly done variation of an existing plot. What do we make of all of this? First, people lik...