: Re: Can Originality Sell a Book? I am currently occupied with the all-too-familiar pursuit of banging my head against a brick wall. In this case, I am attempting to make my novel original. Here's

@Phylliss352

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Originality tends to be judged retrospectively, it is at the best of times debatable and most people would agree that it its not something you can manufacture on demand.

Similarly it is entirely possible for an author to have a very distinctive style without necessarily being highly original in terms of the concepts underlying a book.

Indeed many commercially successful works, in any field, are often not truly original in concept. Often what successful work do is to bring together various elements which are appropriate for their time.

The Harry Potter series was a long way from being original, the magic is a bit vague and underdeveloped by the standards of serious fantasy and the school setting is a very, very well trodden path in English literature. In fact the idealised English public school setting is nostalgic rather than contemporary. However what JK Rowling did was to write very well, although the technical mechanics of the books don't necessarily hold up to very careful scrutiny and there are plenty of plot holes the actual writing in the books is very engaging and compelling.

The key to this is that her writing style allows the reader to forget that they are reading the book and get absorbed in the immediate events and she creates a world which readers want to inhabit.

I would suggest that the real enduring appeal of the Harry Potter book for readers is that they can actually imagine being in the Griffindor common room sitting in front of the fire, watching a quidditch match buying exotic sweets or potion ingredients in Hogsmead or Diagon Alley.

We can perhaps guess that part of the reason that this worked well is that she really cared about the settings and characters. This is a very different thing to trying to work out what the market wants or constructing an high concept based on academic ideas.

Trying had to be original is a fools errand, if you create something that you personally cares about and are invested in then you will automatically want to try to make it as good as it can be to the best of your ability and there is a fair chance that there will other people who feel the same way about it.

Originality comes from putting your own individual personality into something, not from an active effort to be different from what has gone before.

'Ideas' are cheap, everybody has them and you can just pick worlds out of a hat to construct something 'original', the value is in refining, developing and communicating your ideas and having the self-critical faculties to determine what works and what doesn't...this is also related to being able to see your ideas from another persons point of view.

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