: Re: 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

@Debbie451

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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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