Often Misunderstood Writing Advice: “There’s Nothing New Under the Sun.”

It’s widely believed that every kind of story has already been told.

“There’s nothing new under the sun”.

If that quote were true, what about all the other stars? Isn’t there anything new under them?

Moreover, how would believing there’s nothing new help writing evolve as a medium?

Perhaps the quote is meant to prevent new writers from getting in over their heads. After all, if one doesn’t go in trying to reinvent the wheel, they’re going to have an easier time. And that’s fair.

But new writers are often told they’ll never discover something new, that the only thing they might bring to the table is a unique perspective.

It’s said that instead of setting out to reinvent the wheel, authors should “create as beautiful a wheel as they can”. And there’s some real merit to that advice.

But writers and artists are always on the edge of discovery. They discover what works through the writing process, even if they don’t fully understand why it works. New archetypes and story structures are decoded through this mysterious and magical process.

If you’ve ever followed the natural course of discovery writing from starting point to finish, you’ll often find that most, if not all of the elements in your story fit neatly into what “story engineers” have already reverse-engineered and pigeon-holed.

For example, your Chapter 2 may coincidentally turn out to fit the “A Day In the Life” concept perfectly.

You might find that the last romance you’ve written is actually a combination of the “Rags to Riches” plot structure blended with “Overcoming the Monster”, even though you weren’t thinking about those specific structures when you set out to write it.

However, freewriting without carrying the burden of established plot structures can lead you in unexpected new directions, and can perhaps even guide you toward discovering something different–Something you won’t find in Writing the Breakout Novel.

For me, the possibility of discovery is a large part of what drives me. It makes the art of storytelling more exciting.

I don’t enjoy exploring a cave half as much if it’s not at least a little mysterious. I like to see there’s paths yet unexplored. Even a small, darkened hole whispers promises of sights unseen by any human eye.

Story engineers love to explore the entire cave system, pour a concrete path with guide rails, and blast through any blocked paths they find, robbing the cave of its natural beauty and mystery.

They like to break down successful works and drop them into neat little categorical buckets, even if a story doesn’t quite match the buckets’ descriptions.

They dissect stories much like how one might dissect a corpse in an attempt to better understand how humans work, without appreciating the irony that the human they’re working on … no longer works.

With stories, they think they might somehow file off the serial numbers and attempt to put it all back together to replicate the same verve.

But what they end up with is Frankenstein’s monster. It’s like trying to kill the goose to get the golden eggs.

The best stories are greater than the sum of their parts, and the most successful ones often don’t hit the marks a story engineer might expect.

These stories have an indescribable x-factor that eludes the story engineers every time. A soul, one might say; How else can something add up to more than the sum of its parts?

A story analyst might predict a certain book will do poorly, only to see it go on to break sales records and befuddle professional critics alike.

Ask a story engineer to build a breakout hit and they will fail … unless they can get their minds out of the mad scientist story lab, away from this “story construction mindset” and into the heart of the story itself.

No one has the magic formula, and we shouldn’t rest on our laurels assuming we’ve discovered every structure and archetype. Instead, we should press forward and forge new ground–and chuckle whenever someone suggests there’s nothing new under the sun.