I have come to a conclusion while typing my second draft.
I made a bunch of changes to the storyline to try to make it more original. But this draft is in many ways worse than the last. I am considering going back to the original, after changing only the things that are obvious rip-offs from other sources.
So my question is: Would you, as a reader, rather have an original but worse written story, or a clichéd but better written story?

Well, they do say that nothing is original, so it depends. Make sure first that everything ‘original’ is arising from either the characters or the previous situation. Definitely better to have better-written, simply because then I will enjoy it despite whatever is not original (but I’m a fairly demanding audience when it comes to mechanics).

In your case specifically, I would ask why your more original story is worse written.

Seconded. If you strictly went with ‘original’ before ‘makes sense’, that might be the underlying issue. But you also said ‘obvious rip-offs’ which…aren’t good, especially if it’s recognizable to the general reader and not just you as an author. Maybe the problem with the rewritten ‘original’ draft is that there’s a missing step between what happens in the original sense from the situation before that? This is hard to talk about without having a specific example. But say the original draft has Situation A, and what follows is Result A, and in the rewrite you have Situation A with Result B. But because Result B is original, the reader can’t draw from the ‘rip-off’ logic that made Result A logical for the situation. If that’s the case, there might be more significant underlying issues than just originality. So I would investigate the logic of how the characters/plot starts with the Situation and arrives at the Result and if that logic is consistent.

Did that make any sense at all?

As far as the original question goes, well-written cliches (see: Eddings) are the preferable of the two by far.

I just wasn’t as interested in this version. It doesn’t make as much sense. It also stretches things out and is really boring. There’s not as much tension, and my heart’s not really in it. I was trying so hard to be original that everything kind of falls flat.
And the rip-offs are staying out of it, even if I liked them. The beginning is completely re-written, because that was the worst part as far as stealing ideas from other people went. The protagonist’s motivation for joining the war is also probably going to stay as it is now, because I don’t really want the whole ‘Rebellious Princess’ thing. Though I kind of liked it, as it gave more conflict to the story, instead of everything dragging along like a tired horse.
I guess the clichéd story was the one I really cared about. And there are some original ideas in it.
There was a quote somewhere that said something like: You can’t get originality by trying for it. You have to tell the truth in your story, as it comes to you, as best you can, and the originality will come on it’s own. I’m not sure whether I believe that, but I know what story I loved.

Then tell the story you love.

It’s pretty obvious if a writer doesn’t put their heart into their work. Compare the different books in Inheritance: you can just feel the enthusiasm radiating from Eragon, but it begins dying out in Eldest, and by the time we get to Brisingr…

“Original” ideas can come across as hackneyed and/or half-assed if the writing is poor. It’s far more entertaining to read a story that the author enjoyed writing than one they forced themselves to write to make “more X”.

There was a quote somewhere that said something like: You can’t get originality by trying for it. You have to tell the truth in your story, as it comes to you, as best you can, and the originality will come on it’s own. I’m not sure whether I believe that, but I know what story I loved.

I like that quote. I believe my main story is pretty original (though it’s probably not) and I don’t think I tried really hard to make it so. There may have been times where I thought “well I hate the overuse of the ‘chosen one’ trope so I am going to try to subvert it” but it came naturally into my story and works for it. I’ve also tried to subvert plot coupons. My main characters are an unusual race. I strayed far away from making my main character an orphan. He is royalty but he does know it so I don’t have the trope of the main character discovering he is royalty. I am trying to make it not a coming of age story by making the MC 18-20 but it probably still is kinda a coming of age thing. I made him a very competent fighter to begin with. The ending of the first book is bitter sweet. So yeah I think I’ve done a pretty good job without trying too hard to avoid being unoriginal. Now to actually write the thing more…

You’re right. I probably do consider it a coming of age story but often I find it ridiculous when like a 10 year old is fighting giant monsters and travelling the world and stuff so I wanted him to just be in adulthood. The problem is he might still act like a teenager sometimes and what he goes through does force him to grow up so maybe it would make more sense for him to be 15 or something. It is planned to be YA so they might better relate to him if he’s younger.

Wow, I love you guys. We’re all so intelligent and insightful. Let me bask in your awesomeness and preen alongside you. preens

Yeah. Write for the love of it and because your story shows truth. Everything else is secondary, if it’s important at all.

Now I just have to follow this myself.

^^And that is as it should be.

I think the hard part is changing the ripped-off stuff intentionally without losing the story you wanted to write. I guess the way to go about it is to think as deeply as you can about your worldbuilding and about how everything/one in it influences everything/one else.

Also, some stuff is just. so. cool. I still find stuff in books and am like ‘oh, I want to write a story with exactly that in it’ and then realise that, hang on a second, if I did that I’d be plagiarising—and also it’s already been written.

I admit I did a few of those in my first book. Well, not those things in particular, but other things I thought were cool at the time. The over all plot was original—but a few other things weren’t.

My problem is with the cool ideas thing.
To explain:
Most of those things can be changed. However, the words of power that drive away the villain sound suspiciously like the rune from ‘A Swiftly Tilting Planet’. Probably not enough for anyone else to notice, but I know what inspired them. To quote:
I call on the sea and the stars and the sky
To come between Minar and the evil that’s nigh

I call on the thunder, the lightning and rain
To come between Minar and her Enemy

I call on the Maker of all that’s above
To come between Vladruth and the city I love

And here’s the original, if I can recall it correctly:
At Tara in this fateful hour I call on heaven with its power
And the fire with all the strength it hath
And the lightning with its rapid wrath
And the winds with their swiftness along their path
And the sea with its deepness
And the rocks with their steepness
And the earth with its starkness
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

The concept—that there is a set of words that can drive off evil—is something that I will definitely keep. But do I need to rewrite the specific words, or not?

So to sum up, Tropes Are Not Bad?

Well, some of the things have had to be changed because the characters have changed.
For example, the original draft had most of the heroes trying to take the Big Bad’s fortress, and utterly failing. In this battle, several major characters rushed up stupidly and got killed. Now I realize that they wouldn’t do that. None of them are that reckless. (In fact, one of them is quite the opposite.)
Of course, now I’m having problems with that battle in its own right. I like the battle before the fortress, but the heroine and her love interest are supposed to meet there, and there is no way the love interest would march across the desert. It just isn’t something he would do.
Now if I can come up with a plausible reason for that battle to be taking place in the forest, which is on the other side of the country from the Big Bad’s Fortress, I’d be good to go. I’m toying with the idea that he has another fortress, but I don’t think much of that. If they were in the forest, they’d be attacking his allies, not him. Though that could work. It’s not even like the forest is on the route to his castle or anything. And I want the DRAMA potential of an attack on his main fortress, but it would be totally OOC for most of the cast.
Honestly, I’ve been working on this story for three years, and it still confuses the heck out of me.
And I don’t want to end up like Paolini, who just put things in for the sake of Rule of Cool when they don’t actually make sense.

Well, I actually kind of like the battle in the forest version, too. The problem is, I can’t decide between it being an attack on the secondary fortress gone wrong, or a smaller battle that turns into the battle of the century. And until I decide that, I can’t write anything, because that’s what comes next.

I absolutely love his point about similar destinations, but different roads. Excellent way of putting it.

I know but how would EVERYTHING be original? He said some original things he’s read have been horrible so does that include Twilight because of the vampires and werewolves being “original”? The article was very good and he is right about that stuff but I still don’t like originality being too strict. I bet even the tiny bits of supposed originality in things in an overall unoriginal but brilliantly written book is still probably not original. If you’re gonna be strict about it then I say there’s no such thing as originality.

EDIT: Well I’ve read some of this guy’s other articles and he’s pretty good and he does at least once state that there’s no such thing as originality these days.

Honestly, I feel that if a “cliche” is well written enough/ used by a writer of above average talent, it’s no longer a crutch, but a familiar theme affectionately explored by the author. I can’t name specific examples, but I know I’ve seen a few, where the cliche is presented so well that you feel it’s something you’ve never seen before, and when you realize you do know it it’s like a huge joke the writer is sharing with you. Not common, but the effect is awesome enough to make it worth the effort sometimes.

Yeah.

Ever read a book, and remember most of the plot and that it was really good, but you can’t remember any key information and know you’ll never find it again?

So the example I was thinking of was this book about a girl who’s in love with this dude, and it’s a pretty typical romance story. I can’t remember how I got ahold of it but I know I must have had a lot of time to kill. So I’m reading this, it’s a fairly basic modern chick romance, the writing is higher quality than average.

Then there’s this scene, about 3/4 of the way through, when the girl loses a shoe. At that point, all these earlier subtle clues come together, and you realize it’s Cinderella, in the original setting no less, from the girl’s point of view. That moment made me go “HOLY CRAP THIS IS AM-AY-ZING”.

I think the original was omniscient third. I think. This was first-person, and she thought and spoke in a noncommittal enough way that you didn’t know it wasn’t modern until the big reveal, but once you were past it her tone wasn’t distracting or unbelievable. I wish I knew what the name of that book was because it was one of the sweetest purely technical achievements I’ve ever seen.

Ha ha HAAA! Triumphant laughter Yeah-hah! That’s it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Enchanted

Note that I may be confusing this with a few other things (I was like nine when I read it), but that’s definitely the one. Oh man, you have no idea how good it feels to know that.

WOOOOOOOOO

[EDIT]: Yeah, I got a couple elements wrong, but the central plot twist is the right one.

Oh, Ella Enchanted! One of my absolute favorites. Such an awesome book.

The movie was… less than the best, I must agree with you there. Some mildly amusing parts in it, but overall not nearly as good as the book, which is brilliant.

The movie did a horrible, horrible injustice to the book.

/me loves the book to DEATH. DEATH, you hear (well, technically read) me?

GET THE BOOK NOW. IT IS AWESOME.

The prince is named Charmont. It took me much longer than it should have to get it.

@Willow – I don’t know French beyond being able to say “I don’t speak French” in French, but I still got that instantly.

@all of you guys – yeah, yeah, I will try to get my grubby little paws on it.
But once I’ve seen for myself how good it is, I will curse Hollywood even more than I usually do.
Be prepared for killing Mufasa for a vicious rant.

I haven’t read Ella Enchanted either because, like Klutor, after seeing the movie I wasn’t interested. Even though I knew that the book would almost certainly be better, I wasn’t that interested before seeing the movie, and the movie killed any interest that I had. I will put in on my to-read list straight away.

I LOVE ELLA ENCHANTED.

/belated

Ok, since we’re discussing cliches and originality and all that, a lot of stories use the mentor/apprentice/coming of age cliche. What are some things that could be done with that type of story to keep it fresh or give a different perspective? (this is to the group, not anyone in particular).

The mentor gets fed up and ditches the mentored. The mentor is younger than the mentored. Something.

The mentor is only slightly more experienced than the mentee, but certainly not an expert, nor cool in the face of the unknown.

The micro-managing mentor stays alive for the entire story, and eventually the mentee begins struggling under the constant stream of instructions.

I wanted to write a different kind of mentor, so this is what I came up with:

My mentor is female, constantly grumpy, and pretty much hates the mentee (though since the fact that she needs to mentor him is a constant reminder of a really bad thing she did to him when he was born, and she doesn’t want to get attached to him so that she has to think more about it…). She always expects him to be a couple of steps further ahead than he actually is, and she doesn’t wait up for him.

She quickly gets frustrated by him on so many levels that she hands him over to a friend, who is only about ten years older than the mentee. He’s actually pretty good to him—but there’s so much that he doesn’t know, having been outside the system for so long, that he sucks at actually mentoring. He doesn’t like what the mentee is eventually going to have to stand for, but stays with him because he feels sorry for him. And he’s far too permissive—he’d rather act like a big brother or a friend than an authority figure.

I don’t know how different these two are to other stereotypical heroes outside of Obi Wan, but considering the mentee is on a tragic hero’s journey, not a hero’s journey, I guess there’ll be some things that stay the same and some things that are different. Thoughts?

Those sound really interesting, especially Taku’s and Steph’s.
I’m currently working on one that is a Medieval knight/squire relationship. This has really been done a lot, so I’m trying to come up with something that would be fairly realistic. For instance, the knight does not give exclusive attention to the squire’s training 24/7. There are times when the relationship is more like a lord/servant, with the squire having to take care of the knight’s equipment and horse, etc; and other times where the knight turns some of the squire’s training over to older squires. So there is not the same Luke/Yoda, Eragon/Brom, 1-on-1 training going on.
Also, the knight takes the boy to be his squire because he reminds him of a former squire who was killed in battle. He expects the new squire to progress and behave in the same way that his former squire did, which ends up frustrating both the knight and the squire. This is compounded by the fact that the knight feels like he failed his former squire in some way, and is trying to fix his mistakes with this new squire.

I have a mentor who is not so much a mentor as an evil manipulative bastard who uses the wise old mentor disguise to trick the prophesied hero into killing himself by charging into various ordeals completely unprepared.

It works.

Ok, since we’re discussing cliches and originality and all that, a lot of stories use the mentor/apprentice/coming of age cliche. What are some things that could be done with that type of story to keep it fresh or give a different perspective? (this is to the group, not anyone in particular).

Good topic (subtopic? side-topic?).
As a matter of fact, my current WiP focuses a lot on the whole mentor thing. With the whole story, I’m basically aiming to blur a lot of lines: MentorxApprentice, HeroXSidekick, LeaderXAdvisor, MasterxMon…

The mentor isn’t a paragon of virtue.

This must be pretty must compulsory for anyone who aims to subvert the cliche.

shipping goggles

The goggles! They do nothing have now been named!
XD

I’ve got two mentors, and three-and-a-half apprentices (it’s complicated). The two mentors have known each other for a lifetime (but not Biblically, all you shippers!), and they work great together – but they also have no problem pointing out each other’s flaws.
And one of the apprentices is a real handful. And his relationship with the “main” mentor is… complicated, to say the least. Because of a really weird out of left field revelation in the pilot episode.

That’s brilliant is what I call it.

Klutor, your thing sounds so awesome

Thanks!

Rats.

No, actually they are now horses.
But don’t worry – they’ll be rats again by midnight.
XD

BECAUSE THEY’RE IN LOVE, RIGHT? TELL ME IT IS SO!

NOOOO IT IS NOT SO….
They’ve got a bit of belligerent hoYay going for them, though.
It can’t be helped – they’re both very opinionated and stubborn people.

SWQ: oh, you. Don’t go there, hon.