There's no new Fiction - not so!

Revolutionary ideas continue to appear in fiction, while an old idea, creatively re-worked, can be made original anew

For the average fiction-writer today, the age-old complaint of ‘there’s simply no new fiction anymore’ is a constant irritant. This isn’t because they fear that anything they might write will be by-definition a rehashed piece of work, but because it’s simply not true.

With over six billion minds in this world all daydreaming on a regular basis, the idea that there can no longer remain any revolutionary fictional plot-concept or character is laughable, yet so often do we find our eyes rolling while halfway through a movie or book wherein the hero spouts that old clichéd line, the villain stops to describe a master plan that you’re pretty sure James Bond already thwarted a few years back, or the climax becomes clear a good half-hour before it actually rolls around.

So if humanity as a whole really has no limits when it comes to make-believe, why does it seem like so many works of fiction are simply old stories being played out by new faces?

Well for one thing, bear in mind this idea that the Fiction Well has gone dry is really only a few hundred years old, with complaints about there being nothing new in print appearing at pretty much the same moment that print did. With the development of the printing press and the mass-production of books, stories that had previously been restricted to a local region by word of mouth or to the affluent (who could afford hand-copied collections) were now spreading. As the amount of fiction available to one person began to grow, it obviously became more likely that two or more stories encountered would share certain traits, and once we reach the point we’re at today, with the internet, a globally connected publishing industry and thousands of authors churning out thousands more titles each year for public sale, it’s easy to see how overexposure can mask a truly new story.

So is it harder to create something utterly unique today? Most assuredly, but impossible? Take a look at just some of the most recent bestsellers and you’ll find plenty of novel novels. Harry Potter, for example, has been rightly heralded as a revolutionary work of fiction, while another newsmaker, The Da Vinci Code, created controversy in almost every market it hit by presenting a new take on the figure of Christ that had previously enjoyed almost no public consideration.

Now, despite the rather unique qualities of these two works, any detractor would have an easy time picking out the ‘old’ threads in an attempt to expose either as a clever rewording of a story already told. J.K. Rowling might be accused of encroaching upon Tolkien’s territory, with her use of witches and wizards, magic and the inevitable return of an old evil, while the idea of children escaping a troubled life by discovering an enchanted world smacks of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Similarly, Dan Brown’s plot for Da Vinci has in the past been vindictively boiled down into nothing more than a high-speed treasure hunt, framed around a blatantly sacrilegious notion intended to provoke interest.

The problem with these critical comparisons isn’t that they’re inaccurate, but that they’re unreasonable. To demand that each and every newly published work of fiction have absolutely nothing to do with anything that came before is to require that an author forge a new genre with every book. The notion that using already used themes, character-variants or settings prevents an author from penning ‘new fiction’ is only true if that author uses them in the same old way that they were before. In the case of Harry Potter, it was the combination of wizardry and English schoolboys (you’d heard of both, pre-Potter, I’m assuming) which gave rise to the utterly unique world of Hogwarts, with its house-elves, quidditch tournaments and haunted lavatories.

As fiction continues to be written, there will always to be overlaps and yes, plagiarism shall abound. That being said, characters as refreshing as Jack Sparrow will continue to emerge in settings as imaginative as Diagon Alley, and meanwhile, new and groundbreaking forms of fiction will develop out of a revisit, revision or re-evaluation of older ones. So long as they entertain anew, there is no reason why possessing an obvious literary lineage should mar an otherwise original piece of writing.