What Makes A Story Original?

Love, hate, war and betrayal.  These themes come up in novels constantly so you would think that writers had run out of ideas by now, yet every year there are over 200,000 new books published in the UK alone.  Surely these can't all be re-tellings of the same story.

The tradition of storytelling goes back for thousands of years.  Stories have been being told and retold through the generations, but the story being retold is always the same story.  Nowadays it's very easy to find the same story but told through different characters and settings.  Take the classic fairytale Beauty and the Beast.  Edith Pattou reinvented the story for her novel North Child, where the prince is stuck in the form of a polar bear and only changes into his true form at night.  Instead of declaring her love for 'the beast', the young girl in the story must stay with the bear for a year without seeing his human face in order to break a spell put on him by the Queen of the Trolls.  I won't spoil the ending for you, but I'm pretty sure it's clear this story will have a happily ever after, just like the original fairytale.  Although I cannot deny that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the twist that Edith Pattou put on it, can the idea be considered original?


But just because a novel hasn't taken it's structure from a story that has been told for hundreds of years, can it be considered original?  The book I am currently reading, Anno Dracula by Kim Newman, is a good example of this.  The story is sparked by the placement of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula into 1888 as the Prince Consort to Queen Victoria and the plot follows the reaction of the country to the upsurge in the vampire population.  At a first glance you would think that the idea for this novel is completely new and exciting, and although I can see the appeal of adding the famous Count Dracula to a story to change the course of history, I slowly began to see that this novel has 'borrowed' quite a lot of material and characters, either from real life or from other novels of the period.

The main characters at least are fictional, but there are others that are clearly taken from other books.  Count Dracula is the glaringly obvious one, Detective Lestrade is one of the supporting characters, there is a cameo appearance from Dr Jekyll at an inquest and quite a few references to the famous Sherlock Holmes.  But the number of characters that were around at the time the story is set is shocking.  Queen Victoria is a character that couldn't be avoided, but the appearance of the victims of Jack the Ripper, plus the Chief of Police at the time, Frederick Abberline are also interesting additions.

It would be unfair of me to condemn the book simply for borrowing a few characters here and there.  However, some of the plot points are a little grating.  The mystery at the centre of the novel is the Whitechapel Murders, committed by the uncaught Jack the Ripper.  I have no problem with this as it is a very interesting period to cover, but when Newman starts taking liberties with the real life characters, turning some of Jack the Ripper's victims into vampires and turning the killer into a van Helsing type vampire killer.  This is probably the history student in me speaking when I don't like the idea of a writer changing history to that extent.  Having said that, it's a fun read if you put the historical inaccuracies to one side and allow yourself to be entertained by the familiar faces that emerge from the text.


Also the idea of vampires 'coming out of the coffin' isn't a new one either.  Charlaine Harris used this idea in her Sookie Stackhouse novels, a series about a telepathic waitress in the fictional town of Bon Temps in Louisiana who becomes drawn into the supernatural world when she meets Vampire Bill.  Unsurprisingly, these books are fairly unoriginal when it comes to choosing supernatural characters and all the usual suspects are included; vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters and even the odd witch.  Admittedly the introduction of a maenad in the second novel was a breath of fresh air, but in a genre where the imagination is allowed to run wild, surely someone must be able to come up with new and interesting supernatural creatures.  And yet why do I keep coming back to this series?  I can only assume that it's the way Harris uses the supernatural to effect the real world, just in the same way Kim Newman does in Anno Dracula.  And they are fun to read which makes them my guilty pleasure.

But at least the books I have mentioned so far have some redeeming qualities.  For other supernatural fiction I'm sad to say that this is not the case.  If I dare mention the Twilight Saga, which has spread vampire fever through a whole generation of teenagers, I am scared I will either be killed by screaming girls or be eternally judged by Twilight-haters, so I'm not going to dwell too much on that particular series.  Instead I'm going to focus on the countless other young adult novels that have emerged since that are centred on vampires and werewolves.  Admittedly, some aren't too bad.  Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater isn't a bad read and I enjoyed it quite a lot.  I liked the twist she put on werewolves even if I found her lead female character, Grace, rather annoying.  It's not the best written novel in the world but at least I didn't feel like cringing every time I turned the page.

But I'm not really the person to talk as my stories are filled with cliche's and the reinvention of various stories.  Even I will admit that An Imperfect Fairytale has borrowed plot devices from Rapunzel and To The Ends of the Earth is beginning to look increasingly more Mulan inspired.

But is there a reason why we like going back to the same stories and characters so much?  I am one of those readers who, if I like a book, can read it over and over again and never get bored of it.  Maybe there is a safety in familiarity that makes us keep reading reinventions of the same story so we know that, no matter how bad things get, the story will always end happily ever after.

dotty xxx