prezzey wrote:
I don't think a quick check on TVtropes would make anyone "paranoid", to me that seems like a strong choice of words...
Well, put it this way - if you're going off somewhere for the explicit reason of checking to see if anyone else has written anything similar, then you're already at least "worried" that your work might not be the most original thing ever. And it kind of suggests that you're willing to change your work in order to be less like other, existing works, for whatever reason - because otherwise you wouldn't have bothered trying to find out if there was a similar story out there already in the first place.
So what happens when you find one which is similar for the first two-thirds of the story, but goes a different way in the last third to yours? Is that too similar already? Do you need to make drastic unnecessary and hard-to-reconcile changes to your story just because it's a bit similar to something else? And then what happens when you think more about your conflict, your characters, karma and so on and realise that actually, it would be better if
your story went in that direction in the last third as well? It seems to me that somebody already worried enough about it to have checked in the first place will - at this point - be strongly considering not doing what they've already realised is best for their story simply because somebody else has done it before. And on top of that, they'll be worrying that they only realised that would be a better ending because they had seen this other work. Thus, the paranoia sets in. In my opinion, if you spend any of your writing and plot-development time considering the similarity of your work to other works, it's already too much.
Personally, I've met a couple of people who basically never finish writing anything because they spend all their time reading other people's stories and then desperately trying to recapture the fascination those stories inspired in them (good) without touching anything the original story had gone near for fear of not writing something 'original' enough (bad).
prezzey wrote:
I did not recommend "going out of your way"
If you're going to check when you previously wouldn't have visited the site at all, it's going out of your way. I didn't mean anything especially strong by it.
prezzey wrote:
TVtropes is a good way to come across lists of media grouped by topics which might be relevant. If something is not on there then it does not have a huge fandom anyway.
I admittedly don't obsessively read the site, but it seems to me that TVTropes actually only covers a small slice of the media pie, mostly (although not exclusively, obviously) concerning itself with sci-fi and fantasy geek material. On the pages I've read there's been disproportionately large numbers of references to anime, manga/comics and TV series by Joss Whedon, and comparatively little reference to - say - classical literature, which is still something far more people are well acquainted with. If something is not on there, then it does not have a huge fandom
amongst the kind of people who habitually edit TVTropes.
(Personally, I actually rather dislike the site - it seems to be deliberately obtusely self-referential, to the point that half the time you need to read fifteen other articles to work out what the first article you looked at
was actually talking about, half of which in turn you will need to look up half the references in, which is why it wastes so much of your time: it's apparently-intentionally hard to stop reading, and feels pretty clique-ish. It's like a cult - when was the last time you saw someone cite a TVTropes trope name without linking back to the page on the TVTropes site?)
Now, I'm not saying TVTropes isn't interesting or worth reading, and it certainly has information that could be useful to writers - I'm just saying that I'm pretty certain that it's far healthier for a writer to ignore the existence of other works when he's writing, and not worry about telling stories that other people have told parts of before. You're never going to get around it, you're just going to destroy your story trying.