If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much.
Once you subtract the ones that are either just straight-up wish fulfillment, or otherwise reliant on racist/sexist/ageist stereotypes, a lot of the ideas listed here are still perfectly good ideas for a story. They'd be more than "original" enough to drive an episode of Black Mirror or the plot of a mainstream blockbuster movie - areas where originality isn't as important as executing the concept in a way that has market appeal (and is hopefully also high quality).
The issue is more just that the audience for these stories are the editors of a speculative fiction magazine, and readers of that same relatively niche speculative fiction magazine. That is, people who spend a lot of time reading fiction. They, in particular, have seen all this stuff before. After a while, if your whole job is reading stories, of course you're going to get tired of even very good stories about things you've seen a hundred times before.
There's plenty of other places to submit to. If you have confidence in your work and you think your story is worth people reading, but this list suggests these particular editors won't like it... just send it somewhere else.
But who cares that The Lion King and Hamlet may be the same story at the base, they're certainly different enough to be enjoyable each in their own right, and I wouldn't substitute one for the other in some strange form of economization.
I have thought that Sci-Fi / speculative fiction stories are in a really good position to be categorised by something similar to Aarne–Thompson–Uther index.
Consider some basic stories like:
* a person travels backwards through time to prevent a tragedy.
- By doing so they cause the tragedy to occur.
- On returning to their own time they discover the tragedy was necessary for their society.
* a person travels backwards in time to meet their hero.
- they discover the person didn’t exist and become them.
- they discover the person isn’t as heroic as they hoped and coach them.
Just four examples, but I’m sure you can see how many stories fit into each.
>> If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much.
I don't. I'm thinking "damn, my stories are too weird and nobody will understand what's going on, or why".
There is something to be said bout a good, old-fashioned, cliché (pronounced "clee-chaeye", not "clitch"). I think the best story I ever wrote was about... dragons.
I seem to have understood that this list is about things that would get rejected when they're the sole point of the story, but they'd be fine as plot devices within a more fleshed out narrative structure.
Even then, I can recall very good reads (or watches) that could readily fit squarely in one of those boxes but are either very well executed that you either don't see it coming, or even if you do you continue nonetheless, or that have specific context or otherwise build up that makes it very good even if it can be narratively distilled down to a simple this or that.
Also also, this list seems extremely small when compared to tvtropes.org with which, when I catch myself running down that time sink again, I always end up thinking that every single plot has already been written though sheer bruteforce.
Pure originality is exceptionally rare, but that's not really a bad thing. More and more I believe that the human experience is primarily defined by rhymes and analogy, trying to avoid reusing prior work is futile.
"What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9, RSV2CE).
I think you are right, but also, that it is totally legitimate for Strange Horizons to say "we really really want only original work." So long as they don't also say "only original work is valid to create", which is where I (and maybe they, given the disclaimers) take issue with this list.
I wonder if some stories work well with the peer group of authors/editors, but not so much with audeiences.
For example, it's annoying to me as a reader when stories are straight-up rewrites of say the odyssey or hakespeare, or put greek/roman gods in our universe. (same with computer games that are hex based and show the hexes, or card-based games that show the cards)
> Note that we do like endings that we didn't expect, as long as they derive naturally from character action.
This, to me, is probably the biggest thing that makes me hate a story:
The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we'd expect them to act based on what we've seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only to move the plot to a specific ending or scene.
This is a big problem for serialized stories now that fan theorizing on the internet is so common. A good plot shouldn't be completely predictable to your audience, but events need to flow from one to the other because characters and their worlds should have consistency. This creates predictability and means some small percentage of your audience can now guess what is going to happen.
That was fine a decade or two ago when a person might guess the ending to a TV show and blurt it out to their partner on the couch. However, now that small group that guesses the plot correctly will share their predictions on the relevant subreddit which will be picked up by blogs and suddenly everyone knows where you were going.
When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled. Westworld is a memorable example of the creators changing the show because fans guessed what was happening next. The end result was that the show didn't make any sense because it prioritized unpredictability over all else and eventually the world and characters didn't make any sense anymore.
Show runners and writers giving a shit that someone on Reddit guessed their clever twist is the entire problem here. If zero people out of thousands or more actively speculating online thought of the thing you did, that's probably because it doesn't make sense. Adjusting to avoid anything that's been guessed almost necessarily means veering into bad writing.
> When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
The big problem with every single writer nowadays is a complete and total inability to stick the ending.
I'm really trying very hard to come up with a TV show, book or movie that I thought really stuck the ending in the last 10 years (I'm being generous--in reality I'd even say 30 years). A whole host of the fan theories are WAY better than what practically all current writers crap out.
If I'm being charitable, I'll describe the problem as writers lack varied life experience. If I'm being uncharitable, it's that most writers are just not very intelligent.
I could give you a list of endings that I thought were great, but if you can’t think of a single ending that you found satisfying, that sounds more like a you problem than all of humanity simply stopped writing good endings.
Seems akin to complaints that there aren't enough good movies or TV shows these days.
That's so very not the case that the person complaining either isn't looking very hard, or else have such narrow taste that they're excluding most works without even considering them.
Breaking Bad had a very decent ending. It wasn't overblown, it didn't have contrived plot twists, and it was consistent with the the way the characters behaved in previous arcs.
„Bodyguard“, the BBC miniseries, and „My Name“ from South Korea, both on Netflix, as well as „Your Name“, from 2016 (now THAT was one final act and ending!).
>The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we'd expect them to act based on what we've seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only to move the plot to a specific ending or scene.
Bone (the comic) is a masterpiece, but then, in the last pages, we see the main characters make a decision that goes against the last 1000 pages of their development.
It's also aimed directly at aspiring science fiction writers, but it's been referenced enough times on Charles Stross's blog (and other SF venues) that some of its terms have entered my vocabulary and that of other SF readers I know.
EDIT: this list does contain the story type lifefeed mentions in a sibling content.
- Adam and Eve Story
Nauseatingly common subset of the “Shaggy God Story” in which a terrible apocalypse, spaceship crash, etc., leaves two survivors, man and woman, who turn out to be Adam and Eve, parents of the human race!!
That second introduction to the TC Lexicon describes - exactly! - the process used in a poetry workshop I attended back in the late 80s[1]. The outcome of each session was also the same, drowning our sorrows in a nearby pub after the meeting, but also forming some strong and long-lasting bonds with our fellow masochists. I'd say I learned 80% of what I know about writing poetry from that workshop, and un-learned 100% of what I thought I knew before I started.
[1] Poetry in the Making, led by Laurie Smith at the City Lit - the critique was brutal, but worth it in the end! https://www.citylit.ac.uk/
"As you know, Bob..." crops up in just about everything Neal Stephenson does, although I've always thought it's better framed as "Right, I had to learn a *lot* about 17th Century French Naval vessels / encryption / diving equipment / evolutionary biology / the semiotics of theology / whatever else, so now *you* get to learn it too!"
‘1984’ and ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ get around this by just having longish excerpts from a book that’s important to the plot. And these bits are really good.
I don't think any in the list are dismissals. If you remove every item, you're left with nothing that can be said about anything in scifi. The items also include plots used by acknowledged authors in celebrated stories.
This is like TV Tropes: a trope is neither good nor bad, it just is. It can be overused, it can be subverted, it can be played straight or played with, but the one thing you cannot do: avoid tropes entirely.
Besides TV tropes, the page made me think of the quite entertaining "How Not to Write a Novel"[1][2], which not only details tropes to avoid, but also quite humorously illustrates them with short stories.
If you're already a TV Tropes addict, I can strongly recommend the book.
> This is not a canonical list of bad stories or story cliches. This is a list of types of stories that we at SH have seen too often; it's not intended to be a complete list of all types of bad stories, nor are all the items on the list necessarily bad.
The book is much better than the show, but both examine what living in a Christian-facist state would look like. The graphic depictions serve as a warning: “this won’t be fun.” It’s kind of scary how prescient the book is.
I still say there is very little daylight between The Handmaid's Tale and any random Gor novel. The only difference is in the Gor universe the guys are actually enjoying it.
SO many tv shows are just gore porn. It's horrible when you think how much murder and sexual assault we all witness on a near daily basis via the tv shows we watch. That baggage is being carried around in our head somewhere.
The amusing thing is how many of the items on their list bring to mind a great short story, or a great novel, or movie. Point being that many of them CAN be good, but usually aren't.
> is how many of the items on their list bring to mind a great short story
That may be how so many of these ended up on this list: someone wrote a great story with an original premise, and lots of other people are like "Oh, I like that idea, I'll write my own story using a similar idea", and then editors get sick of receiving them.
As an aside, I really like the disclaimer's approach, kind of like the Disney+ messages on certain movies, where they say they don't necessarily agree with something but still present it in the original form.
To me, it was a little disconcerting, like "we've stopped receiving these things too much, people got the message, and now we're receiving other things too much, but aren't going to update this to tell you what they are, and are leaving it for posterity."
Maybe there aren't new overdone stories, people see the list and stop. But that seems unlikely to me. In either case, it would be nice if there was a list that was updated, or some statement about things being better.
It's just an old list some editors put together for fun, there's no requirement to regularly update something you made a decade ago. If anything, I'd say there's an obligation to keep the original text available as long as you're maintaining the website. I don't find any of this disconcerting.
I’m a fiction writer and I don’t have such expectations of this list.
Some publishers have a short list of things they don’t take due to having too many submitted. I don’t think that’s what this list it. For one it is far too detailed to keep updated.
I see this list as a subset of bad storytelling they were seeing often. It’s not a subset of things they didn’t accept. (There is significant overlap.) It’s an important distinction.
Lists like these get published occasionally and they become part of the history of the internet. They truly are a snapshot in time.
I wish I could ask Netfix/recommendation engines to strike stories matching a certain story profile. In particular I rarely enjoy a story about point 4. I like watching something without spoilers so avoiding 'Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real' is really difficult.
I wish that recommendation engines had a "rational fiction score" for their content. Things like Expanse, Sanderson's Mistborn series (were it to be filmed as a show, ah, one can dream) or 2001 Odyssey would rate highly, things like "From..." not so much.
Most of these are all plots of successful movies or TV shows.
* Creative person is having trouble creating. Creative person meets a muse...
Xanadu, the movie.
* Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real.
About half of Twilight Zone episodes.
* An AI gets loose on the Net, but the author doesn't have a clear concept of what it means for software to be "loose on the Net."
Terminator
* Technology and/or modern life turn out to be soulless.
"The Office"
"The Lorax"
This one goes all the way back to "The Machine Stops".
* Bad person is told they'll get the reward that they "deserve," which ends up being something bad.
Several Twilight Zone episodes.
* Person is floating in a formless void; in the end, they're born.
"2001"
* Person uses time travel to achieve some particular result, but in the end something unexpected happens that thwarts their plan.
That one really has been done to death in SF.
* A mysteriously-named Event is about to happen ("Today was the day Jimmy would have to report for The Procedure"), but the nature of the Event isn't revealed until the end of the story, when it turns out to involve death or other unpleasantness. [Several classic sf stories use this approach, which is one reason we're tired of seeing it. Another reason is that we can usually guess the twist well ahead of time, which makes the mysteriousness annoying.]
This is the plot of the New Testament.
* In the future, an official government permit is required in order to do some particular ordinary thing, but the specific thing a permit is required for isn't (usually) revealed until the end of the story.
That was a 1950s thing, and seems to have died out.
* Someone calls technical support; wacky hijinx ensue. Someone calls technical support for a magical item.
> * A mysteriously-named Event is about to happen ("Today was the day Jimmy would have to report for The Procedure"), but the nature of the Event isn't revealed until the end of the story, when it turns out to involve death or other unpleasantness. [Several classic sf stories use this approach, which is one reason we're tired of seeing it. Another reason is that we can usually guess the twist well ahead of time, which makes the mysteriousness annoying.]
This is also the plot of an amazing short story called The Icarus Gland. It's written by a Russian author, and all of the translations are terrible. But, even with the terrible translation, it still captivates and keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Well, that's the whole point of that list, innit. They are pointing out the kind of stories that have been done to death, so that people stop doing them to death, already.
Of course, all this is because everything has been done. Read Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales". Read one story half way, and ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right.
In 1483, there was so little published entertainment that plot twists were unnecessary.
I think what happened is that writing and even publishing has become democratised, in a sense. In the sense that there are many more people alive today, than in Chaucher's time, that can write, and that want to write (because they love reading, or even writing) and that can do it reasonably well, and get their writings published. Inevitably, the majority of those people will not come up with the most original stories, or the best writing, inevitably the majority of what is written will not be the best of what is written. Duh.
So it's not like there's fewer stories to tell now, it's just there's more people writing and 90% of everything is dross, as ever since the dawn of time.
Seen another way, in Chaucer's time you had to be Chaucer to write, and publish. Nowadays, anyone can write and publish. Inevitably, quality degrades, and originality degrades.
It's a running theme in some of John Scalzi's short fiction. I believe several can be found searching his blog, but the easiest place to find them are probably his collections. A couple were adapted as shorts in the anthology animated series "Love, Death, and Robots" (Netflix Original) most notably the Emmy-winning short "Automated Customer Service".
What Strange Horizons really wants is a high-quality SF/F/Horror story.
They see hundreds or thousands of low-quality stories for every high-quality story. And nobody wants to be told that the reason that they aren't being published is that their story sucks.
But everyone sane can see that their story might have been done before, perhaps too often -- so it doesn't hurt as much to be told that your story is being rejected because it's on this list.
There has to be some irony that this list of plot points has been done so many times, from Campbell's hero's journey, Vonnegut's shapes, TV tropes, etc.
And still we enjoyed it.
I am sure some English professor somewhere is gnashing his teeth saying something about here's another analysis he doesn't need to see...
> Fatness is used as a signal of evil, dissolution, and/or moral decay, usually with the unspoken assumption that it's completely obvious that fat people are immoral and disgusting.
My favorite novel that uses this trope has to be A Confederacy of Dunces.
"A Confederacy of Dunces" struck me much more as a chronicle of weird people and their foibles with a large dose of regional flavoring--sort of like Napoleon Dynamite but focused on a city underbelly.
I don't remember "fatness" being a signal of evil, and I don't remember any of the non-fat people being any better than the fat ones.
However, it has been quite a while since I read the novel, and I really didn't like it very much. So, my memory may be faulty, and your mileage may vary.
> The author is apparently unaware of the American constitutional amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment, and so postulates that in the future, American punishment will be extra-cruel in some unusual way.
I've got to admit, there's a lot of inspiration in that list. Though maybe use a couple and not make one of these the sole interesting thing about the story. Also, execution always matters.
And some of these should definitely be avoided at all costs.
My least favourite story is "A lot of things happened to the protagonist and the world around him, but in the end everything is exactly like it was before all that".
Homer is dead, we live in linear time, can we please please have some progress for a change?
A notorious offender is Terry Pratchett's Discworld. When the world needs to change, it happens between the books. In any book, you know you will end up with the same status quo as when you started reading.
Even if we are talking about something happening off-world, the experience would completely change the character. They can't just resume being young, shy and ignorant. Even some PTSD would be better than nothing.
> A notorious offender is Terry Pratchett's Discworld
The wording implies an offense has been committed, but this is not the case.
For one, because it's false: progress happens in book in Discworld. There's a series of "industry/progress" novels that illustrate change in the Discworld.
But also, because the timelessness of Discworld is what makes it appealing. With some exceptions, you can read a lot of the novels in any order. This makes them good, not bad.
Are there any specific discworld books you’d like to highlight?
Some certainly fit into that pattern (I’m thinking specifically Soul Music and Moving Pictures) but things do evolve in the interconnected series.
Especially considering the later ‘Industrial Revolution’ stories - the Truth, Going Postal, Making Money all made some incremental changes to Ankh Morpork. The last (and sadly one of the worst) books Raising Steam had the biggest potential to change the fantasy world with the introduction of railway travel.
Sounds like pretty much every Coen Brothers movie to me, at least so far as the world not changing at the end.
Isn't that the case for most people, that they don't end up changing the world or society around them? At best maybe they helped open a hole in the dike for water to seep through for future generations.
Obviously that's not the case for superhero or chosen one stories, but true for most people in life.
What stories are you thinking of. There are a lot of stories that fit your description except that the protagonist is usually (implicitly, often) changed in some way, they learned a lesson, they have a new perspective, etc
I found only two (#27 and #42a). There are several other unpleasant tropes about women in the list, but none of them sound particularly aligned with incel-dom.
For example, #18a seems like a fan fic for a viciously angry man going through a failed marriage or a divorce; and while such a man is a deeply unpleasant person, he by definition - having been married - is not an incel.
Once you subtract the ones that are either just straight-up wish fulfillment, or otherwise reliant on racist/sexist/ageist stereotypes, a lot of the ideas listed here are still perfectly good ideas for a story. They'd be more than "original" enough to drive an episode of Black Mirror or the plot of a mainstream blockbuster movie - areas where originality isn't as important as executing the concept in a way that has market appeal (and is hopefully also high quality).
The issue is more just that the audience for these stories are the editors of a speculative fiction magazine, and readers of that same relatively niche speculative fiction magazine. That is, people who spend a lot of time reading fiction. They, in particular, have seen all this stuff before. After a while, if your whole job is reading stories, of course you're going to get tired of even very good stories about things you've seen a hundred times before.
There's plenty of other places to submit to. If you have confidence in your work and you think your story is worth people reading, but this list suggests these particular editors won't like it... just send it somewhere else.