A little bit of background for this topic: from my teenage years into my early 20s I was a prolific writer and artist. I wrote dozens of short stories, fanfics, and even a full length novel which I never posted publicly. I drew a lot, too. I would never consider myself ‘good’ at either discipline, but I’d say I reached the lofty heights of ‘passable’.

Unfortunately, you need to make a living in this world, so I put all that aside for about 10 years to become a software developer. I was still consuming a lot of media, though, and still do to this day. Like you guys, I lamented the wokeification of games, films, and books, and frequently discussed it with people in my personal life. I kept coming around to the same conclusion: ‘If we’re not happy with the stories the mainstream are providing, we need to create our own’.

Fast forward to today, I’m at a position in my career where I’ve automated a lot of things so that I have more free time. A few months ago my wandering mind was struck by a bolt of inspiration from the blue, and for the first time in ages I felt the desire to create again. As I sat down and organised my ideas, though, I realised that I was (consciously and sub-consciously) pulling elements from media which I have enjoyed and combining them into my own story. It’s very difficult to put a number on these things, but if I had to estimate I’d say about 60% of my ideas come from media, 40% from my own personal experiences. Of course, I did the same thing as a teenager, but I’m a bit more self-aware now than I was back then.

My question to you guys is, do you care about originality for its own sake, or does it have more to do with how a story is told? When I think about my favourite stories, some of them are extremely trite and tropey, but they are told masterfully well. Is it even possible to be truly original in such a media-saturated world as ours?

For what it’s worth, I don’t intend to shake the foundations of the world with my story, I just want to tell a good one that isn’t full of woke BS.