- Joined
- Jan 22, 2008
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- 8,137
The best way to write a book that is fresh and original is to write about things that really interest you, whether they have been written about before or not.
I agree. Someone (maybe Mark Twain) once said that originality consists not in doing what nobody else has done, but in doing exactly what you want to do. I also think that a book written excessively cautiously, or with too much attention on what an imaginary audience wants, is more likely not to work.
As to characters being aware of tropes, I think it's very much a situational thing. There's a risk of a story becoming too self-referential when the characters compare their situation to what they've seen or heard. That could be fine in something like Buffy, which is inherently ironic, but could damage the immediacy of it all. I once read that The Walking Dead is set in a world where George Romero didn't exist, so that the characters aren't continually comparing their situation to existing zombie films.