Are Borrowed Ideas Bad Ideas?

If you're a writer, you've probably been in this situation at least once: you come up with an original idea for a story, you get really enthused about it and start building on it, and then you discover that the idea isn't so original after all. It can be pretty disappointing for some of us to reach that realization, and looking at how much flack movies like Avatar and books like The Hunger Games have gotten for supposedly "borrowing" ideas from other works, it can also be pretty discouraging. Granted, both of those examples have been insanely huge successes, but not many aspiring authors have that kind of confidence in ideas they've barely begun to develop.

So what do you do in this situation? Should you abandon your idea altogether, should you alter it beyond recognition, or should you leave it as is and see how things turn out? And actually, is it even so bad to have a story that isn't 100% original?

One defense that people often make for alleged ripoffs is that there are only so many story ideas out there, so of course every book, movie, or TV show is going to remind us of something else. While I personally don't agree with the idea of there only being "so many story ideas" in existence, I will consent that we haven't come up with many new ones in a while. That being said, I do agree that stories shouldn't be condemned right off the bat for having familiar elements. What it comes down to, at least for me, is just how many familiar elements a story has and how well it presents them.

On the surface, The Hunger Games does have a similar premise to the 1999 novel Battle Royale; it centers around an annual tournament in which a group of children are thrown together in an isolated place and forced to fight to the death while being heavily monitored by the government, and (spoilers) two competitors end up defying the rule that there can only be one victor and walk away from the tournament together. Where The Hunger Games differs is that its tournament is constantly juxtaposed with a social commentary on the shallow glamor of celebrity life and how morally blind the public can be to things that are trendy. Also, the rules, setting, and reasons for the tournaments in each story are not the same, just the intended outcome.

Lastly, whereas Battle Royale is a single book, The Hunger Games is a trilogy of books that pretty much stops focusing on the tournament and becomes an entirely different entity by Part 3. What happens to the boy and girl who survive the tournament in Battle Royale? We don't know, because the story ends there. The Hunger Games sequels, however, go into great detail about Katniss and Peeta's lives after they defy the rules and how they eventually overthrow the dictator responsible for the tournament. Suzanne Collins had an idea that wasn't entirely new -- unbeknownst to her at the time, by the way -- but she gave it a unique spin and developed it into something that was able to find life and a storyline beyond its initial premise. The first Hunger Games book only sounds like a ripoff if you describe it as generally as I did at the beginning of the previous paragraph.

And then there's the film Eragon. I can't speak for the book series by Christopher Paolini since I haven't read it, and I'll give the screenwriter the benefit of a doubt too, but I find it very hard to sit through the movie without recognizing story elements from the original Star Wars film. It's one thing to have the same premise as another work; it's another thing to have the same plot. I know the idea of a lowly peasant getting thrown together with a princess, a wise old man, and a rogue scoundrel to battle an evil empire wasn't new even when Star Wars used it, but the specific storyline in that film was unique. The movie Eragon's storyline, in contrast, is practically note by note identical to Star Wars. Replacing the lightsabers with swords and the spaceships with dragons and horses doesn't make the narrative different.

What makes this worse is that Eragon doesn't even retell that story well. A lot of its scenes just putter out and give up at the end, and you never feel like you know anything about the characters or their personalities. It doesn't even feel like you really saw a film by the time it's over. Believe it or not, I might have actually excused the movie if it had told that story better than Star Wars. At least then it could have argued a case for its derivative-seeming nature.

This is the way I feel about Avatar. I never really minded how unoriginal the story in that film was because honestly, I don't think the movies it supposedly ripped off were that good to begin with. Condemning Avatar for borrowing from movies like Pocahontas and FernGully: The Last Rainforest is kind of like condemning The Hangover for borrowing from Dude, Where's My Car? It's not exactly tainting the good names of any masterpieces. Avatar may be corny and as subtle as a brick to the face, but it's one of the better versions of the "ignorant-person-destroying-the-forest-until-he-bonds-with-the-natives-and-saves-it" story.

Getting back on topic, what should an aspiring writer do if they realize their story idea isn't so original? Before deciding to pull the plug on your idea, you should take some time to really examine what you've got. How much does your story remind you of that other one that already used your premise? Does your story offer something unique from that other one? Most importantly, do you as the writer see potential in your story? If you have enough confidence in your idea and if you can even devise a way to make it more distinct from other similar works, you should proceed with it. If it seems like a weaker retread of something else, I would suggest setting it aside for later and going back to the drawing board in the meantime.

And if by chance you don't discover those similar works until after your story's been published, then hopefully you made your story as good as you possibly could.

Can You Tell a Good Story Without a Villain?

Well, this is it. My Villain Month ends today. I've discussed as many elements and techniques about writing villains as I could think of this December, and now that those bases are covered, it's time to ask the ultimate question about this topic:

Can you tell a good story without a villain?

I've said before that the basic set-up for a story involves a protagonist having to overcome an antagonist in order to get what the protagonist wants. I've also said that every villain is an antagonist, but not every antagonist is a villain. Considering this, it seems possible for a story to exist without the cruel and malicious presence of a villain, but how compelling can a story be without that?

Not very, according to some writers. 

The plot of L. Frank Baum's book The Wizard of Oz is extremely different from the plot of its 1939 movie adaptation. While the Wicked Witch of the West serves as the villain in the movie, in the book, she comes and goes in one chapter roughly halfway through the story. The book's real antagonist when you get down to it is the twister that carries Dorothy from Kansas to Oz, and the focus of the story is her overcoming that twister by finding her way home from the place where it stranded her. This didn't seem like enough of a conflict to L. Frank Baum, so he wisely inserted a variety of minor but personified antagonists into his tale at every twist and turn. If he hadn't, the book would have either been two chapters long or so tedious that no child would have ever wanted to read it, and there wouldn't be a movie adaptation to compare it with today.

This episodic structure is also used in the 2009 comedy movie The Hangover. Yes, I just compared The Hangover to The Wizard of Oz. The biggest threat in The Hangover is that the three protagonists won't be able to find their friend, who went missing at his own bachelor party, in time for his wedding. A ticking clock is the antagonist. Despite that, the movie still gives the protagonists everything from bitter police officers to an angry crime lord -- and even Mike Tyson -- to deal with on the side while searching for their friend. Without the inclusion of those opposing characters, there wouldn't be nearly as much urgency behind the protagonists' actions, and the story of them following clue after clue around Las Vegas would get repetitive fast.

Disaster movies in particular like to add villains to the mix to support the main conflict. The film Twister has a subplot about a rival team of storm chasers trying to beat the protagonist's team to the catch. The Day After Tomorrow has a stubborn, closed-minded Vice President who objects to the hero's every suggestion (and who couldn't be a more obvious Dick Cheney caricature if he shot someone with a hunting rifle halfway through the film). And of course, Titanic has a slimy rich fiance who tries to come between the betrothed heroine and her true love. By attaching a nasty personality to the conflict in each story, it becomes somewhat easier to get emotionally invested in the main characters.

But what are some examples of stories that truly have no villain? Ironically enough, the first one that comes to mind is another disaster movie set on a boat, The Poseidon Adventure. A giant wave flips a cruise ship upside down at the beginning of the movie and the survivors spend the rest of it trying to escape without drowning or getting killed by the ship's mechanisms. The characters do argue a lot along the way, but they all share the same goal and never try to sabotage each other.

What makes the conflict so interesting is that not all of the people who initially survive the ship flipping over end up surviving the journey out of it, and our concern for the remaining characters increases with each additional death. On top of that, the main protagonist, a preacher played by Gene Hackman, has his faith put to the ultimate test throughout the story as he questions why God would allow so many innocent people to die so senselessly. The film's main focus is on humanity overcoming hardships and how a single character views that, as opposed to most other disaster movies that focus on spectacle and juggle so many character subplots that they tend to feel like soap operas.  

Another story with no real villain is the Pixar movie Finding Nemo, which is obviously rare for a children's film. We find out that the human who "captured" the fish Nemo only did so because he thought that Nemo was too injured to survive in the ocean and would live longer in a tank. The man's niece Darla, despite her theme music that's borrowed from Psycho, is not a villain who's out to terrorize fish either. She's a little girl who just shakes the bag too much because she doesn't know any better. What's more, the creatures that attack Nemo's father Marlin and friend Dory while they search for Nemo are portrayed more like real, instinctive animals than like anthropomorphic characters; the only attackers who even talk are the brainless seagulls that just yell "Mine!" over and over again. Bruce the shark does briefly go after Marlin and Dory when he smells blood and relapses from his no-fish diet, but the movie makes it clear that he's only attacking in a mindless frenzy, and he's in control again by the end of the scene. Nobody ever plots against the protagonists or intends any personal harm on them throughout the course of the movie.

The real antagonist that hangs over all of this is Marlin's fear of facing life and taking risks, as well as the risk that this fear will ruin his relationship with Nemo. Much like The Poseidon Adventure, Finding Nemo is mainly a character study, albeit a more fun-oriented one. This also seems to be the case in romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally, where the antagonist is Harry's own fear of commitment.

So from the above sampling, I think I've answered my closing question for Villain Month. It is entirely possible to write a good story without any villains as long as your characters are well-written enough to drive the conflict themselves. Otherwise, I say keep giving them bad guys to fight off and match wits with until they've become well-written enough characters.

That's I'm doing in my next book, anyway.