Today’s lesson isn’t on how to write, it’s about how to accept the fact that your story will never be viewed as 100% original. To give this lesson, I’m going to tell you about how I almost stopped writing.

When I was a little kid, I loved the idea of characters who could control the elements. I even spent time figuring out what nature’s “true” elements were and one of the first stories that I ever thought up was about a group of girls with magical powers who had to save another planet.

Then this was published: 

For those of you unfamiliar with W.I.T.C.H., it’s a series about girls with magical powers who control the elements and have to save another planet. It was pretty popular in the early 2000’s and they even made a TV show based on the books.

But that all happened well after this story reached its end, so let’s get back to little me, who picked the book up on a whim and was heartbroken by the time she’d finished it. Someone had stolen my idea and got a book about it published. Now I’d never be able to write my story. What was the point? It would just be called a knock off even though I’d had my idea long before W.I.T.C.H. had hit bookshelves across America.

I won’t bore you with the soul searching and sadness experienced by little me. Instead, I’ll just get straight to the point. Straight to the lesson I had to learn to be a good writer: it doesn’t matter if people view your work as original. What matters is whether or not they enjoy it.

Every book you’ll ever read, every show you’ll ever watch, every movie you’ll sit and gasp at will remind someone, somewhere of another story. Any new magical school books or books about young wizards will be likened to Harry Potter for years to come. The new Pixar movie, Inside Out, has already been compared to the 90’s TV show Herman’s Head for having a similar idea about personifying a person’s emotions and let’s not even mention the dozen or more reboots and based-on-a-book films that we’ve seen in the past few years and will see in the not-to-distant future.

There are 7 billion people on the planet. At least one of them has thought up a story that’s similar to the one you’re writing right now. A fact that was true even when the earth’s population was a mere fraction of that number as evidenced by the fact that so many different cultures have fairytales and folklore that are shockingly similar. But you know what? I bet that your story has something that sets it apart from the others. I bet that you have some clever line that will make people laugh or maybe you’ve got a character that people will connect to in a way that they don’t in the other versions. Or maybe your uniqueness comes from the setting, you’re telling Cinderella in steampunk or Star Wars in the old west.

What I’m getting here is that unique is more important than original. Take 5 stories and blend them together and you’ll get something that the world’s never seen before, even though it’s seen all the base ideas 1000 times.

So don’t give up when you see similarities in other stories. Instead, let those things inspire you to make your story even been than it was before so that it shines, not for being the only one of its kind, but for being one of the best.

And, hey, if you really do have an idea that’s 100% original, definitely get that thing published. The world hasn’t had one of those in millennia.