Here’s the scenario:

One day while folding clothes, you—the amazing writer and creative genius that you are—have a concept for a new novel, one that seems to have simply bubbled up from the abstract and infinite substance of the Universe.

You become positively electrified by this idea, which generates more ideas, all multiplying faster than teenage rabbits in heat. Suddenly, you have an entire universe of settings, characters, plot points, and scenes rendering themselves in the theatre of your mind.

Over the next few days, you go about your process of capturing the ideas, coming up with a catchy title, and giving your characters cool names and nuanced backstories.

Perhaps you dive in headlong and careen through several chapters of a first draft. You may even slapdash the entire first book over the course of one grueling week, locked away in an isolated mountainside cabin, foregoing, food, shower, or sleep.

Then, one night whilst mindlessly scrolling through social media or shopping for your next read on Amazon, you come across an ad or a product description for a book that looks suspiciously similar to yours.

You know, the one that got you all energized and giddy with excitement, reinvigorating your love for the craft? The one you already invested so much mental bandwidth and emotion into?

You read through the book’s synopsis and realize that—shit on a shingle— your sizzling hot idea for a new novel or series has been taken!

The premise is so akin to that of your own book that it would be impossible to realize your work without risking the accusations of ripping off this other creative genius that just so happened to beat you to the punch.

You slump in your seat, quake with nausea, and grieve for the brainchild that you must now bury alive.

Your burgeoning cast of characters huddle together and weep as the void grows around them, soon to swallow them up into non-existence.

“Oh, Creator!” they cry out. “Why would you so cruelly allow us this taste of life, only to take it from us so soon?“

You heave with mighty sobs, slam your laptop closed, and curl up in your bed, inviting death to come release you from the agony.

Many creatives have been here, at this darkest impasse. Many delete fucking everything and move on, perhaps. Many, no doubt, spiral into a holding pattern worse than the death of the book project itself, one that globally sours all creative efforts.

But hold on—is it all really so bleak?

Nothing is Novel

In a big ol’ world of over eight-billion brains—and billions more that have come before these—somewhere out there your groundbreaking idea has already been conceived of and possibly even published in some incarnation.

This is just reality.

It’s impossible to be totally original, so don’t even try.

Storytelling has a tradition as old as we are, maybe even older if you count the shrieking and wild gesticulations of an Australopithecus warning his peeps of the cave bear he just saw in the forest.

If luminaries like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell were really onto something, storytelling has its roots sunk deep in the most fundamental fabric of being, with archetypal characters that represent different aspects of human nature appearing time and again across cultures.

All of that just to say that every story we have is some augmentation, iteration, or amalgamation of other stories or concepts that came before.

Even what you may think is a unique blend of two or more pre-existing ideas—what Neil Gaiman refers to as confluence in his Masterclass series—might turn out to be well-charted territory.

What, then, makes a story unique?

Simple, really—it’s the treatment!

This means the characters, settings, interactions, sequence of events, plot points, world building, rules of engagement, symbolism, and much, much more.

If you hand Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino the same movie script, give them endless budget, unlimited creative liberties, and send them off to work, you’d better believe you’re going to get two vastly different film experiences in the end.

Some Examples

The concept of human beings colonizing out into space is certainly not unique, but the authors of The Expanse series of novels took this core idea and gave it one hell of a treatment, bringing characters to life in stunning detail and stirring the plot up with a nuanced chemistry of character motives and quirks. A tremendous amount of research and logical infrastructure was put into play to build the universe envisioned in The Expanse, the treatment of which sets it apart from the countless other space operas.

And, in my opinion, The Expanse is one of the greatest sci-fi series ever written, even though its core concept was not some mind-splintering breakthrough of the imagination.

Harry Potter is quite obviously replete with concepts which have been transcribed in storytelling DNA for centuries; wizards, griffins, trolls, dragons, and shapeshifters all converge from many, very old oral and written traditions across place and time. Yet this confluence comes together in such a wondrous and unique way with its canon and characters that it created a significant impact on the world of arts.

The Witcher series mines from the same quarry of folkloric monster tales as Harry Potter but collages them across the canvas of a unique and exciting world with its own deep histories and mysteries.

Both the titular protagonist Harry Potter and The Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia contest with mythical beings and wield magic, but their respective worlds are starkly different in treatment; while Harry Potter is feeling his way through the awkward morass of puberty, Geralt of Rivia has already shagged the sorceress Yennefer rotten on the back of a stuffed unicorn—two entirely disparate aspects of treatment here.

Game of Thrones is equal parts soap opera, Greek tragedy, and high fantasy that can trace much of its conceptual genome back to Shakespear’s dramas and Tolkien’s mythical mundus, whilst having more than enough of its own essence to eclipse any need to produce counterfeit Hamlets or Hobbits.

And don’t even get me started on the endless cliches, archetypes, and tropes teeming throughout anime and manga storylines!

Saving Your Story

As a writer, you have two options available to you in that dismal moment where you discover your idea is taken:

1. Give up on the idea and move on (not easy to do, especially if your heart is in it and you’re already chapters deep into the book).
2. Consider your treatment of the concept and do everything within your power as a writer to differentiate it from the others, while still serving your vision and injecting it with what is unique to you, its creator.

Now, if you come out with a book called Mary Trotter & the Room of Mysteries, about a girl who lived in the attic of her mean old Aunt and Uncle’s house until she was visited by a magic benefactor on her tenth birthday and was whisked away to a secret school for magic folk called Snogforts, you might be getting a call from J.K. Rowling’s attorneys. This story would replicate both the concept and the treatment, even though the treatment is modified with pallid analogues. Even a four-year-old would be able to draw direct comparisons between Mary Trotter and Harry Potter. Needless to say, this would be a bad move on your part to continue giving life to this miscreation.

Blatant rip-offs do abound in arts and entertainment, nonetheless, as you can easily see if you peruse the back catalogs of Amazon Prime or Netflix (back in my day this was the B-movie shelf in Blockbuster). While rip-offs change enough of their treatments to avoid copyright infringement, the audience doesn’t take any of these imitators too seriously from a cultural or critical standpoint and they’re deemed disposable, adored by no one, in the end.

Forge Ahead

If you can keep in mind the insight provided above—that every core concept has pretty much been imagined at some point—you can begin to focus on your treatment and telling the story that is unique to your particular characters.

When I started ideating my Greycross novel series a few years ago, I stopped midstride to think critically about what I was trying to create; I feared that perhaps such ground had been covered too many times before.

I was ready to drag ‘n’ drop all of the inspired notes I had compiled into my hard drive’s digital dustbin, but I couldn’t shake the idea that a whole world was begging to be born, regardless of it appearing to be an all too familiar concept on the surface.

After all, the ideas of monsters, angels, demons, exorcists, and conjurers have been around since ancient times. But that’s ok, because as I mentioned earlier, such things are fundamental to the human experience at some level, even if you don’t personally subscribe to the religions or buy into the mythos.

Writers of all types keep coming back to these kinds of concepts, and it’s precisely because they are constituents of that archetypal framework so deeply embedded in our nature.

And readers love them!

So, instead of pivoting away from a story I knew had tremendous potential, exciting plot points, and vivacious characters, I began to write, paying special attention to my treatment of the core concepts.

In parting, I would encourage you, fellow writer, to recover that story idea you might have abandoned for fear of it being too derivative and resuscitate it with a fresh new treatment.