Your Story Doesn’t Have to Use any Themes of the Genre

It just won’t be part of that genre. There are a lot of good books that are set on another world or feature some kind of magic, but that don’t resemble the books of J.R.R. Tolkien. It sounds as if you like that kind of setting, but don’t want to write fanfic. So the happy middle you’re looking for, in that sense, is to identify what aspects of it you like and which are trappings you can remove.

If you’re not writing for money, I would try not to worry too much about whether other people will feel it's original enough, either. Write what you’re inspired to write! Slice ideas fine enough and everything’s been done before, somewhere.

Familiarity Can Save You Exposition

If everybody knows that Elves are super-agile, super-strong pointy-eared forest hippies, the readers will get an Elf joke without an explanation. If your countries are absolut-ish monarchies with male-preference primogeniture, you won’t need to spend as much time as George R. R. Martin telling them how it works instead.

Even your deliberately silly terminus a quo of something alien, telepathic super-platypuses swimming in lava, is really not all that unfamiliar an idea. Telepathic superheroes are common in SF, talking animals in children’s books, and platypuses and lava exist on Earth. But, choosing familiar elements like telepathic, super, platypuses and lava lets us clearly picture what you’re talking about. If you had to explain the joke, it wouldn’t be funny.

This is especially helpful for a short story, where you can’t spend most of the words explaining where the story is set.

Remember, Your Audience is Human

Holly Lisle once wrote a little retrospective (We’d call it a blog post today.) about her first book about a vampire. She was hinting at a romance between him and the heroine, but the ending was going to be—Ha! He was just tricking her! He doesn’t feel human emotions like love at all and was nothing but a sociopathic, irredeemable monster. All he really wanted was to use the one person who felt anything for him, then seal himself off in a nice cave forever, alone.

Then, she realized: vampires would’ve loved that ending where he rejected humanity and reveled in his vampire nature. But she wasn’t writing for vampires. She was writing for humans, who wouldn’t be able to relate to that character or take any satisfaction in that ending.

Humans can identify with some very basic motivations. We can even relate, to some degree, to selfishness, lashing out, getting back at someone or just to really really wanting something. If Lisle had been making some kind of stronger statement about what would never work, we might even retort that everyone who reads her book can relate to wanting to be alone with a book sometimes.

But it’s a good illustration of a good point: the reader has to be able to relate to the characters and what’s happening. They won’t have any emotional connection to Elven history or traditions. You might spend a lot of time selling us on why those are fascinating and worth fighting for, and you’d have a good story if you pulled it off, but short of that those won’t make good motivations for the protagonist.

Instead of Repeating, You Can Rhyme

You can make a theme just recognizable enough to put an original twist on it. Galaxy Quest works if you know what it’s parodying, and USS Callister has a much more serious bone to pick with the source material. Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream has a point to make about Tolkien’s love of prehistoric Germanic myth and culture and his invention of superior and inferior races. Writers have been stealing from other stories since the Stone Age, and literary critics love it because it gives them something to talk about.

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