You know, one of the hardest things about being a writer is coming up with an original idea. While it’s true that there are technically no NEW ideas (after thousands of years of stories, they’ve all been used), you can combine unoriginal ideas in such a way that it’s original. For example, in Fablehaven the author took the idea of the classical fairy tale creatures living among us (a very overused idea), and combined it with the idea of a magical preserve. While you can argue that this has been done before, it still FELT original (to me at least).

Having understood this concept for awhile now (I’m a writer, aren’t I?), I’ve had a decent amount of practice combining ideas in an interesting way. I had come up with who I thought was a really original villain for my story…then I watched Deathnote. My villain was more or less a clone of Light Yagami. Now you can imagine my distress at this. I came up with the idea on my own. I’d never seen a character quite like my villain in fiction…and then I see him in a freaking ANIME. True, there are some differences. My villain, Araden, actually attained godly powers rather than finding a magic notebook. But when I looked through Araden’s ending monologue, it was creepily similar to Araden’s. Araden also reminds me very much of Lelouch from Code Geass (which I also hadn’t seen until recently). So I guess it’s back to the drawing board so to speak with my seemingly original villain that’s been the main character of two well known animes. Coming up with fresh ideas as a writer is hard enough. But when you suddenly stumble across a work you had never even HEARD of that uses almost the exact same idea, it is very depressing as a writer.

Well, I’m off to write another story. Let’s hope this doesn’t also happen to be an anime that I haven’t seen, lol.