: Originality of Writing I have been writing a book, and often times I feel like a lot of the elements in my story are just Freudian slips. I'm not plagiarizing or anything, but sometimes I

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Embrace what you cannot avoid. All writers are the products of what they read, seasoned with small dashes of what they care about or have experienced in the real world. None of us can escape it and I would venture that there is little reason to try.

Even the authors we love are victim to this recipe. Their writing borrows from the talents of those authors whom they admired and enjoyed.

This is not an act of theft. It is a process of immitation and enhancement. It cannot be theft, because writing is many-faceted and hard. What you write while thinking about another's scenes, is not a plagaristic duplication of their work (unless of course, you copy their work word for word). Your writing will be weaker than theirs in some ways (immitation) and could be stronger than theirs in others (enhancement). It will never be the same.

Quite often, I deliberately steal from the writers I love. I have a bookcase behind me and the top shelf is full of fictions which I have reread so often that their stories are hollow to me now. Each of these novels is full of earmarked pages and scribbled margin notes. They are my pirates booty of stolen treasures, each crafted by a more talented writer than I.

Whenever I get stuck in my writing, (for me that's usually fighting scenes, love scenes and scenes that are emotionally dark) I will sacrifice some of my writing time and just read one of these masterworks. Using my page folds and notes, I can usually find a scene that is similar to what I'm trying to write. Just by reading through the scene, perhaps including a few pages before and after, I remind myself of my favorite techniques for handling this particular writing challenge.

These stories are so old and warn out for me that I don't get caught up in their story telling. Instead, I'm free to pay attention to their word choice, their sentence length and their metre. By drinking in the structure of another author's hand, I'm usually able to find my best voice for the scene I need to write.

This technique has gotten me through those horrible times when without it, nothing I wrote seemed to work at all.

Is it thievery? probably.
Plagerism? no.
Does it help me write my stories in the manner I want the written? definitely.

I wouldn't spend much time worrying about your originality. There is very little opportunity for originality left. Instead, invest that time in reading. Fill your mind with beautifully written scenes and masterfully crafted characters. Then steal everything that is worth taking from them, and pour it into your craft.

Your readers will thank you for it, and if you are lucky, someday they will steal a few scenes from you.

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There's a couple practical things that can help. First, try keeping a dream journal --anyone can learn to remember their dreams, and it's a direct connection to your own personal subconscious.

Second, try exposing yourself to a different form of creativity --music or visual art. At least then if you're influenced, it will be by someone who isn't working in your own field.

Finally --it has often been said that "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." We are all influenced all the time by what we see and read --the question is to what extent are you making something truly your own. After all, even Shakespeare's plots were far from original. Worry less about whether something is reminiscent of something else and more about whether it's good enough to justify using it.

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Let me answer this in a more practical fashion:

Let's say you've written a Hero's Journey, which has a standard pattern. And as you read over your work, you realize "this sounds a lot like Star Wars!" (Not unreasonable, since Lucas followed Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces pretty closely.)

Find the first element which strikes you as unoriginal, and change it. Let's say your protagonist is a farm boy.

Make him a city boy.
Make him a nobleman's son.
Make him a factory worker.
Make him an astronaut.
Make him a woman.

and so on. (Choose as many as will fit into your scenario.)

Then take the next element: Her parents were killed, launching her quest.

Her parents are absent, and she was raised in an orphanage.
Her parents are present and loving, and she chooses to go.
Society allows for group marriages, so she has three fathers and five
mothers. Some want her to go and some don't.

Et cetera.

If you change enough of these items, and then carry the changes forward throughout the story, it should deviate you from your visible influences. Your changes can also spark new ideas — for example, if you go with the group marriage idea, that can significantly change the "hero gets the princess" ending, because now the heroine can get the princess, the prince, and maybe a neighboring duchy, and what does that do to inheritance and alliances? And that creates a new, wholly original set of plot problems you can work with.

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Have you ever read a few words, or heard a description of a plot twist, and thought, "that sounds like something thus-and-so would have come up with"? We all have, and that's because the writers we love have visible hallmarks of their style. Themes recur in their work, and they favor certain kinds of language.

Wearing your influences on your sleeve, both with phrasing and plot points, is a common problem with new writers. The only solution is time and experience.

As you continue to write, you'll develop your own styles of plotting and phrasing. Similarities with stories you've already consumed will, in time, melt away. They'll be replaced by your own voice.

When you have several manuscripts under your belt, you'll have the confidence to phrase things in a way that pleases you, not a way you've read before. You'll have the courage to try plot twists that are not established tropes, or at least not as common.

What if it turns out that you're not a new writer, that you've been writing for years? Then I'll suggest that you need to develop confidence in your own abilities.

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