Everything Old is New Again (Take Your Story Back to Basics)

An obsession among writers is that many of them feel their work has to be new, different, or unique in some way. They are always striving to re-invent, to re-imagine, or to alter the perception of an idea, a genre, or a story. And sometimes that genuinely leads to fresh perspectives and fun concepts that hadn't been explored on the page before... other times, though, it just leads to contorting something to try to make it look different without asking if it's actually more interesting to see it from that perspective.

So I wanted to take this week to suggest a trick I've been using a lot, and which I've had pretty good results with. In short, take whatever genre, tropes, story, world building, etc., you're using, and examine what it was before its latest incarnation. Because sometimes going all the way back to basics can really make you stand out.

You want vampires in your book, you say?

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Elves, Vampires, Magic, and More!

Practically everything we use to tell our stories is built off of things established by earlier creators. Whether you're taking inspiration from the works of Tolkien, Howard, or Burroughs to write fantasy, you're drawing on folklore to populate your stories with monsters, or you're looking at folk heroes and ancient propaganda to form your semi-historical narratives, all of us are getting our ideas (if not our understanding of the raw elements of story) from somewhere.

However, as time has gone on, the ideas present in a lot of these stories have grown and changed, becoming different from what they originally were. And though it seems paradoxical, you can actually make a story feel more unique and different from its contemporaries by using something old in a new way.

Because I took my own advice on this one.

Folks who've read my novel Crier's Knife have said it has a distinct feeling of the bastard child of a pulp fantasy novel combined with a Western, which was very much what I was going for. However, in order to give it that old-time, sword and sorcery feeling I rewound the clock on how magic has often been depicted in fantasy novels. Rather than using Vancian magic (which became extremely common thanks to its prevalence in fantasy RPGs), or more modern "spell point" magic (where wizards, sorcerers, etc. have a certain pool of power they can draw on to achieve whatever effects they need), I used more ritual magic that was far more common to stories in the 1940s and before. Where the method of the magic isn't explained at all, and where the ingredients, actions, and sacrifices demanded are meant to give the audience the feeling of the spell rather than walking them through the internal logic of what it is supposed to do.

Aesthetic magic, if you will.

This is far from the only example of me using this method in my own work. It's also showing up a lot in my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age setting for Pathfinder and DND, and you can clearly see it in the elves and orcs books I've released where I've attempted to take some elements of Tolkien's original creation and show them in a different light. However, you've also seen this strategy at work if you've read Salem's Lot by Stephen King, where the celebrated author eschews the evolution of the sexy, tortured vampire and gets back to basics with a riff that's much closer Bram Stoker's original novel. You see this in more modern werewolf stories that reach back to the idea of a curse where the host has no control over what happens, and you could even see it in romance novels where the Norseman is the love interest because of his grooming and personal care just as much as because of his sword arm or linguistic skills.

There's two reasons this strategy works.

The first is that for older readers, they're seeing something familiar in a new light. It can bring back nostalgic feelings, and give them a new twist on an old recipe. The second is that for some readers, either due to their age or experience (or lack thereof) in the genre, your work will be the first time they've seen things written with those older aesthetics, rules, or sensibilities in place, which will make it feel new and unique to them.

In either situation, you come out ahead.

So if you're wracking your brain trying to re-invent the wheel, consider for a moment if you might actually make more progress (and get more interesting results) using an earlier design rather than attempting to build off of the version everyone already knows today.

Looking For Additional Reading?

If you're looking for additional stuff to check out before you go, might I recommend the following?

- 5 Tips For Creating Fantasy Towns and Cities: I've been up to my elbows in professional fantasy world building for most of this year, and these are the tips I've found most useful for making sure places feel organic, no matter how fantastical they are.

- The Silver Raven Chronicles Part One: Devil's Night: A free fantasy short story, this tale begins in the old quarter of the city of Kintargo. A rumor whispers in the corners of a ghost risen from the past to take Cheliax to task for allowing devils into its heart, and its throne room. Most don't believe it... but one of the city's dottari finds this ghost is all too real when it steps out of the shadows with a message for her to spread to her fellow enforcers. They are no longer welcome in his city.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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