How new does your story have to be?

    The short answer: new enough not to bore your readers with redundant plot lines and two-dimensional characters.

    This is a question I ask myself all the time, and to be honest, it’s probably also one of the biggest stumbling blocks in my work.  Every time I have a new idea, I ask myself “is this old hat?”  Sadly, I know enough about the medium I am working in to know that someone else has done it.
    Creating dragonmen, battle robots, heroes and heroines, and an assortment of worlds, religions, cultures and styles is a daunting task; every writer has faced it before (in fact, every artistic person has faced it, no matter the medium).  We have a grand idea, like some sort of pneumatically controlled, hydraulically powered armour suit and we tell ourselves “damn, Stan Lee did it, Heinlein did, and 80% of anime has done it” then we abandon the idea and never look back, even though it was, truly a great twist on an old yarn.
    Jude Deveraux said, “There are no new stories.  It all depends on how you handle them” and she is very right in saying that.  We know two people will fall in love in a romance, we know the hero will win the day in the epic; we can be assured that the sleuth will catch his crook and every dog will have his day.  We can be equally sure that robots, orcs and ogres, energy swords and spaceships, and all flavour of mage and shaman has been talked about at least once before us.  We should not, however, let that stop us!  Rather, we should be happy to build our works on the shoulders of our peers and make every last wordsmith before us be proud of us.

    It is a question of how you handle it that much is true.  For example, a program I watched about the events of Revelations, specifically the Anti-Christ, recently inspired me.  The concept of the Anti-Christ is an interesting one, because he will sell himself to the world as a great and benevolent leader, the best and worst of us will want to trust him, even though he hides great evil.  What an amazing character, and even more, what an amazing antagonist!  Its no wonder George Lucas paid homage to Revelations with the character of Palpatine, who was, for all intents and purposes, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
    You see there, though, I have had an idea, questioned its inherit newness, and found that recently someone else has done it.  Can I then, use the same idea to any new effect?
    Yes I can!  And I will!  Just because it was recently done in one of the most anticipated movie series of all times doesn’t mean I cannot put my own special twist to that sort of a villain.  My two faced antagonist will not be Emperor Palpatine, while they will be forced to share certain fundamental traits, they won’t be the same character.  For starters, my antagonist will not possess a wheeze.
   
    I suppose the original question has a logical derivative: How much can your work mirror reality in speculative fiction?  The only answer is this: AS MUCH AS YOU WANT!  In fact, you should use reality as much as possible because reality does create the strangest fiction.  Even in speculative fiction, where you are creating strange worlds and people to tell a story, the meat of reality is a fine inspiration.  Take for example Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which is heavily influenced by the author’s time in the American Navy during the Second World War.  He created one of the most interesting socio-political war stories of the twentieth century, and did so using a backdrop that could have been the Pacific; all you needed to do was replace Klendathu with Tokyo, and Planet P with Iwo Jima.
   
    Again I have rambled, but hopefully made a point.  Standing on the shoulders of the creators who came before you is entirely acceptable in writing.  The sooner you can grasp that, the sooner you can abandon that gnawing sensation that it won’t be new (unless your hero’s name is Link Skyslinker, at which point, rethink that).