When reading books or watching movies, it’s rare that plot twists or events will catch people by surprise anymore. Almost every plot twist has been done in multiple books or movies. Is there any originality left in the world? What does everyone else think? Has humanity run out of ideas? There are thousands upon thousands of books and movies in circulation, so have we exhausted all possible ideas?
Some would suggest that we have always been telling the same tales, this is why Joseph Campbell's The Monomyth is still so relevant and Jung's character archetypes. I think this is an interesting topic to discuss, and in that talk about tropes, generic features and the previous works that have been done in genre study - however, this should not be discussed as a negative. We tell the same tales as the same things matter to us regardless of time and place - we love, we live, we grieve and we die - nothing will change this, it is not the originality of a new story that matters, but the inclusion of a new voice within the world. – SaraiMW5 years ago
I would love to see this topic discussed. I think this has a lot to do with how far we allow a writer to veer from the expected path (Campbell's heroic journey for example). If they veer too far, they lose the audience, if they follow it too faithfully, it's boring. How can a writer meet the "requirements" yet still be novel? – tclaytor5 years ago
There is a book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (by Christopher Booker) which can be woven into an essay on this topic. – Joseph Cernik5 years ago