The Same But Different: An Approach for Evaluating Originality with Scott H. Andrews

The Odyssey Writing Workshop is a six-week course that takes place every summer on the campus of Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Like many contributors at Speculative Chic, I had the privilege of attending, and I graduated in 2005 with today’s guest writer, Scott H. Andrews, the World Fantasy Award-winning editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You may recognize Scott’s name from the past: he’s shared with us his Favorite Things, and he also talked briefly about how to find the spark in your work. Today, he’s here to talk about how one evaluates originality in one’s fiction. But wait, there’s more! He’s also one of this year’s guest speakers at Odyssey, which is currently accepting applications now through April 1st. Don’t miss out: Odyssey is a wonderful opportunity that’s jumpstarted many a career, and advice like what you’ll read below is just a taste of what you’ll get if you attend. Scott, take it away!

When I’m teaching writing, or reading manuscripts for critique, or reading submissions at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I often hear questions about “originality.” Some new writers worry about making their settings or characters as “original” as possible; some longtime writers say that every idea has already been done, and they want some familiarity in the work so that the audience feels comfortable. Sometimes novels that are different get good buzz and notice; other times they flop and end up outsold by books that feel like the same thing as countless others.

So where is the right balance? It seems like some amount of originality is good but too much might not be, and that works with little originality are sometimes quite successful.

My favorite gauge for balancing “originality” and sameness comes from a writer I was in a writer’s group with decades ago. In the 1980s he had worked for TSR, the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons. He was at a toy fair with a marketing person, and from them he heard a fascinating idea about this balance. One of the biggest toy crazes of the early ’80s was Cabbage Patch Kids. They were a doll, but no two were alike, in their facial features or clothes or hair. Each one even had a unique name and came with their own make-believe birth certificate and adoption papers. As with any craze, lots of imitations soon popped up — dolls of the same size and appearance — and this toy fair was full of them.

But this marketing person said: the trick to making an engaging follow-up to a previous thing is to make it “the same but different.” What other doll in this toy fair was “the same but different” as Cabbage Patch Kids? Not any of the imitations, this marketing person said — those other dolls that looked blatantly the same. It was Pound Puppies. Pound Puppies were plush toy dogs that looked completely different from Cabbage Patch Kids, but each one came with a make-believe adoption certificate. Pound Puppies copied that feature of Cabbage Patch Kids — the pretend adoption — but in a form factor so different that the toy felt distinct from Cabbage Patch Kids, unlike all the obvious imitations, and they were quite successful.

“The same but different.” If you look at TV, movies, and books, you find that concept there too.  The ’90s TV show Friends influenced Steven Moffat (later of Doctor Who and Sherlock) in writing Coupling, a British take on the sitcom about six twenty-something single friends. It was a success in Britain — the same array of characters as Friends, facing similar challenges, but with a different, British-style take on relationships. NBC made an American version with adaptations of Moffat’s scripts, and it was canceled after four episodes; the British take fell flat with American viewers. The next time NBC adapted a British TV series — The Office — the writers more deftly translated the British concepts into American analogs that weren’t always the same but that engaged the audience in a similar way.

Star Wars in 1977 was like nothing audiences had seen before. George Lucas took the space opera vibe of 1940s and 1950s serials like Flash Gordon and TV shows like Buck Rogers, combined them with Joseph Campbell’s mythic plot structure and aerial dogfights based on WWII footage, and made a movie somewhat the same but visually wildly different. One year later, the original Battlestar Galactica TV show mixed similar space dogfights (created by some of the same special effects artists as Star Wars) with an Exodus plot arc. 20th Century Fox found BSG so similar to Star Wars that they filed suit, but viewers found it different enough that ratings were good for the first half-season. In 2003, a BSG remake used some of the same character names and setting concepts but with many elements made thoroughly different, including giving the robotic Cylons a fully human appearance; it ran for six successful years.

“The same but different” also threads through decades of epic fantasy novels. The popularity of the US edition of Lord of the Rings in the 1970s was followed by Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, which featured many character and plot elements in common with LOTR — too much “the same” for many readers “but different” enough for others. In the early ’80s, Raymond E. Feist’s bestseller Magician had a similar pseudo-medieval fantasyland threatened by outside invaders, but with a plot and characters more like Star Wars than LOTR and the different twist of the protagonist spending half the book living in the invaders’ society. By the mid-90s, many writers might have said that pseudo-European medieval epic fantasy was played out, but George R.R. Martin’s Ice and Fire novels took a same-feeling setting and executed it with differently deep characterization and differently immense worldbuilding, and soon those novels topped bestseller lists worldwide.

And classics like Shakespeare, who famously lifted plots for his plays from legends and earlier Renaissance works, and ancient Greek theater, which used characters and plotlines from their mythology, but all rendered differently through the playwright’s own characterization and language.

So how much “the same” is OK, and what type of “but different” is best? That’s the difficult part — figuring out that balance between the same and different, when you’re designing an idea for a novel or any other project. It’s unique for every work, but I do see a common thread in many of these examples.

In Star Wars, the differently stunning visuals — those huge starships and swooping dogfights–awed audiences regardless of how similar the space opera plot or Campbellian arc felt. The 1978 Battlestar Galactica grew stale with too much the same visuals as Star Wars and not enough of its different plot arc, but the 2003 remake leveraged its different elements, including using the human-appearance Cylons for gripping plot twists. The American version of The Office made the clueless boss more sympathetic and focused as much on the character arcs as on workplace monotony. George R.R. Martin’s Ice and Fire novels too focus on character as much as on the detailed fantasy setting, including characters’ family relationships and emotional arcs. With Cabbage Patch Kids, the pretend adoption that Pound Puppies copied gave a personal connection that a child could feel with the doll.

The common thread I see in the “the same” aspects of these examples is that they resonate with the audience emotionally. Literary agent and writing teacher Donald Maass, in his book Writing The Breakout Novel, says that for him, many successful novels in their concept have “Gut Emotional Appeal” — an aspect that engages the audience emotionally; that makes them feel something. Star Wars made moviegoers feel awe; the 2003 Battlestar Galactica hooked viewers with mystery and suspense; The Office and the Ice and Fire novels (and later the Game of Thrones TV series) connected with their audience through characters and their arcs.

Whenever starting a novel, I think it’s always wise to consider this idea of “the same but different.” How does your novel’s concept compare to other similar works; recent and past. How much of your concept feels “the same” as other works, and how much feels “different”? What aspects of it feel “the same” and what ones feel “different”? Will the elements that are “the same” feel comfortably familiar to your intended audience, and will the elements that are “different” feel fresh or engaging? Is there Gut Emotional Appeal in it somewhere, whether the emotional appeal is “the same” as a similar work, like in many of the examples above, or is “different”?

Those questions to me are more revealing than whether an idea is “original” or not. Apply them to your ideas, and the TV shows and movies you watch or books you read, and see what “the same” and “different” you can find and leverage to use in your own work.

The Odyssey Writing Workshop is a six week writing workshop for science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors, and it is currently accepting applications for its 2020 session. The workshop will be held from June 1st through July 10th, 2020 and feature the daily teachings of Jeanne Cavelos and the following guest speakers: Brandon Sanderson, Yoon Ha Lee, Scott H. Andrews, J.G. Faherty, Sheila Williams, Barbara Ashford, Carrie Vaughn, John Joseph Adams, and E.C. Ambrose. To learn more and discover how you can apply, click here. Applications are due by April 1st, 2020.

Scott H. Andrews writes, teaches chemistry and fiction writing, and is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the seven-time Hugo Award finalist online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His literary short fiction won a $1000 prize from the Briar Cliff Review; his genre short fiction has appeared in Space & Time, Crossed Genres, and Ann VanderMeer’s Weird Tales. He has taught writing for Clarion West, The Cat Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, Houston Writefest, and Odyssey. He lives in Virginia with his wife, two cats, thirteen guitars, a dozen overflowing bookcases, and hundreds of beer bottles from all over the world.