When I started writing The Stygian Blades earlier this year, I was nearly petrified by concerns about being “unique” enough. Here I had this story about a teenage actress who gets framed for treason and has to work with a band of rogues to clear her name. A grizzled, down-and-out mercenary veteran, an exiled jinn, a frostroot-addicted shadow mage, a boisterous pistol-packing albino dwarf, a disgraced playwright who’ll seduce anything with a pulse—I mean, come on. Every fantasy heist story you’ve ever read. Ocean’s Eleven meets The Lies of Locke Lamora in a Shakespearean underworld.
I was so paralyzed by the familiar elements that I almost never started writing it.
But somewhere along the way, I realized something: There are only eight notes in music, but we’ve never run out of songs.
Bob Dylan sounds nothing like Beethoven, though they use the same fundamental notes. The notes aren’t what make music original—the rhythm, the melody, the voice singing them does. Stories work the same way.
Back in July I wrote on Substack about embracing tropes, arguing they’re just LEGO blocks for building your story. But I didn’t realize how many writers are still paralyzed by originality anxiety until I posted a simple tweet: “Nothing is original. Every story has already been told—but it hasn’t been told by you. Write it anyway.”
Three million views, nearly 100K likes, 14K retweets, almost nine hundred comments, and about a thousand new followers later, the response was clear. This fear is epidemic.
C.S. Lewis understood the originality trap.
“You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original; whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
That’s the entire game right there. Authenticity over originality.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde
This originality anxiety doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s taught. Reinforced. Made to sound sophisticated.
In MFA workshops and online discourse, “spot the trope” criticism dominates because it’s teachable and quantifiable. You can create worksheets for identifying familiar patterns. You can feel smart pointing out that someone wrote “the chosen one” and declaring it a derivative, tired, over-worn cliché. Pattern-matching feels rigorous while requiring minimal expertise—criticism that can be taught in a semester rather than developed over years of reading.
What you can’t easily teach is why some executions of familiar stories hit you in the gut while others fall flat. You can’t fake understanding of why some work transcends genre while other work just competently executes it. That requires developed taste built through extensive reading and attention to what separates literature that resonates with millions of people from forgettable entertainment. Years of it. But anyone can pattern-match surface elements and declare themselves a critic.
Call something “unoriginal” and you’re done. No need to engage with execution, voice, thematic depth, or whether the author is using those familiar elements to explore something genuine about duty, meaning, trauma, or the human condition. This approach persists because it appeals to insecurity. Writers internalize it and start checking over their shoulder constantly—has this been done? Is my twist original enough? Will someone call me derivative?—instead of focusing on whether they’re writing something true.
I know this personally. When I talk about Immortal, someone inevitably dismisses it as “Rey from Star Wars meets Dune.”
Galactic empire? Check. Prophecy? Check. Female protagonist with emerging powers? Check.
Analysis complete.
Never mind that the story explores questions about identity reconstruction, caste-based oppression, and the psychological cost of serving systems of power. Never mind the thematic architecture or what I’m actually trying to say about loyalty and complicity. They spotted familiar elements and felt their analysis was complete.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
Voltaire
When Avatar hit theaters in 2009, critics lined up to dismiss it as derivative before the opening credits finished. Spot the familiar structure, declare “derivative,” collect your critic credentials.
They were right about the story. They were catastrophically wrong about everything else.
Because this is where the “spot the trope” criticism falls apart. Cameron didn’t try to disguise the familiar framework. He leaned into it with absolute conviction—and then elevated it beyond genre into something that works as literature.
When Jake says “I see you,” it’s not just a romantic beat. It’s the entire thematic architecture compressed into three words. Seeing as opposed to looking. Understanding as opposed to exploiting. Recognition of personhood instead of treating others as resources.
That’s why millions of people reported post-Avatar depression. Not because the special effects were good. Because the film made them feel, viscerally, what it might be like to experience genuine connection with the natural world—and then forced them back into a reality where that connection is treated as naïve hippie bullshit.
Cameron’s genius wasn’t finding a story nobody had told. It was using a resonant story pattern to explore real questions so effectively that audiences felt truth in their bones.
The critics who dismissed it as “Pocahontas in space” weren’t wrong about the pattern. They were demonstrating exactly the kind of lazy analysis that can’t distinguish between a competent execution of familiar elements and work that achieves something lasting. They spotted the trope and felt their job was done. No craft knowledge required.
The dismissal misses that Cameron wasn’t just hitting the right beats for an action-adventure blockbuster. He was exploring genuine philosophical questions about consciousness, interconnectedness, the relationship between exploitation and ecological destruction. The film works as spectacle, sure. But it also works as meditation on what it means to truly see another person, another culture, another way of being in the world. The worldbuilding isn’t just coherent—it’s thematically integrated at every level. Pandora’s neural network isn’t cool sci-fi window dressing. It’s the physical manifestation of the film’s central question about connection versus extraction. The bioluminescent ecosystem isn’t just pretty. It makes visible what Western industrial capitalism treats as invisible—the living relationships that sustain everything.
Cameron committed fully to exploring these ideas through narrative rather than lecture. No character stops to explain the symbolism. The themes emerge through story, through Jake’s transformation from someone who “sees” Pandora as a resource to be exploited into someone who actually sees the Na’vi as people with legitimate claims to their own world.
The three-act structure, the character arcs, the visual storytelling—yes, all executed with precision. But in service of something larger than “competent genre film.” Cameron was working at the level where spectacle becomes art, where entertainment becomes examination of how we live and what we value.
And it’s still the highest-grossing movie of all time globally.
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
Mozart
Shakespeare didn’t invent most of his plots either. Romeo and Juliet borrowed from Arthur Brooke. Hamlet recycled the Danish legend of Amleth. King Lear pulled from Geoffrey of Monmouth. The man was a remix artist working with familiar materials.
We call him the greatest writer in the English language.
Joseph Campbell found the same basic story structure appearing across cultures worldwide because these patterns reflect something universal about human experience. The question was never “is it new?” The question is “does it transcend paint-by-numbers genre slop to say something true about being human?”
When readers meet Sarai in Immortal—a genetically enhanced assassin who literally starts the story by having her brains blown out on the tyrant’s orders, only to regenerate with her memories lost—they immediately understand the stakes. They know this tune. But what makes it mine is how I play it. The exploration of identity when you’ve literally died and come back wrong, the way caste-based oppression echoes real-world systems, the psychological trauma of rebuilding yourself from fragments—all while discovering you’re pregnant with a child of prophecy that makes your body political property.
The story is built on questions that have driven me since reading Ender’s Game as a teen. What does it mean to serve a system that might be fundamentally wrong? How do you reclaim your identity when someone else has tried to erase you completely? What’s the cost of loyalty, and when does duty become complicity? Where is the line—if any—between destiny and choice?
Those aren’t original questions. But they’re my questions, shaped by my experiences, by watching how systems of power actually work, by understanding what it means to be part of something larger than yourself—even when that something might be flawed.
What makes Kit’s story in The Stygian Blades mine isn’t that no one’s ever written about a traveling player or a conspiracy against the crown. No one else has written about this traveling player—a sharp-tongued, illiterate actress fleeing murder charges, navigating the eternal twilight of a tide-locked world where the sun never moves. The familiar framework of “rogues clearing their names” became the vehicle for exploring the specific grit of Crownspire’s underworld, the cultural paranoia around magic as witchcraft, the cost of survival in a world where even brothels are money-laundering fronts for religious seditionists.
I’m not using these elements despite them being familiar. I’m using them because they’re familiar. The notes give you the foundation; your life gives you the melody.
Take the scene in The Stygian Blades where Kit’s secret identity gets exposed. A girl disguised as a boy, discovered by a hardened authority figure—Shakespeare did it, every swashbuckler since has deployed it. You know this beat. But when Captain Chócht confronts Kit with the broadsheet calling for her arrest, the scene isn’t about gender performance or romantic comedy. It’s about class violence and survival economics.
Kit’s not worried about being accepted as a woman. She’s calculating whether Chócht will sell her to the gallows for five pounds. When she finally admits to killing the lord’s son in self-defense after he “made unwanted advances,” she adds that nobody ever cared about that. That line does more work than the entire familiar framework around it. It exposes how justice functions in this world—or rather, how it doesn’t function for traveling players and bastard daughters. The expected beats play out (revelation, confrontation, decision), but the stakes are completely different. Not “will she be accepted?” but “will she be sold?” Not identity crisis, but survival calculus.
The scene works because readers recognize the trope. They come in knowing the pattern, which lets me subvert their expectations about what matters. Chócht doesn’t care about Kit’s gender—he cares about her nimble purse-snatching fingers. The mercenary company becomes a space where competence matters more than respectability, where a girl who’s been running since she defended herself can finally stop. That’s my exploration of power and agency, built on a framework that’s been around since Twelfth Night. Same notes. Different song.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest Hemingway
Stop asking Grok if your story is original enough. Stop feeding ChatGPT your plot summary to see if someone else already wrote it. Stop checking over your shoulder to see if someone else already climbed this mountain.
And please, for the love of God stop browsing TV Tropes.
Instead, ask yourself whether your interpretation rings true to your experience. Does the story feel authentic? Are you exploring something that genuinely matters to you—questions you actually wrestle with, truths you’ve actually lived—or are you just trying to be too clever by half?
Master songwriters don’t avoid using C major because it’s been done before. They use it because it works, because it resonates, because it’s part of the universal language that lets them communicate with their audience.
Stop performing originality and just write what’s true for you. Stop obsessing over whether someone else climbed this mountain before. Focus on your own journey up it.
Write the story that’s been rattling around in your head—the one built from your specific obsessions, your lived experience, your particular way of seeing a familiar situation. Yes, someone’s probably written something like it before. But they haven’t written it with your voice, shaped by your life, filtered through your understanding of what it means to be human.
The view from the top will be yours alone, even if the path has been walked by others.
There are only eight notes in music, but we’ve never run out of songs. The song you write with those notes—the truth you tell—that will be yours alone.
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