Pen and PaperPeople love hearing stories, and the art of story-telling is as old as language itself. How can we resist a good story when our lives are often repetitive and ordinary? For almost ten years I’ve had this one story stuck in my head, and I’d love to get it all down on paper to share

Like many of the stort stories I’ve written, it has one primary character and a series of questions. I don’t like creating people that already know everything, or that can burst into a room and instantly handle any situation. Come to think of it, I don’t think there’s been a clear ‘hero’ in any of my stories. Characters like Captain Kirk or James Bond work great in movies and TV, but seldom leave much room for personal growth. What’s their challenge? What makes them tick? Occasionally an author can skillfully delve into the specifics of their heroes while keeping readers engaged in the story, but this often isn’t the case.

This story has survived four major revisions, but each time the premise has remained the same. Now I’m penning the fifth (and final?) revision and left with the same question that I had when the plot was originally conceived: who else has written this story?

Books are amazing. While being ultra low-tech, they’re capable of sending us to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, to unexplored regions of history, or into fantastic worlds with mythical creatures. They can tell others of our personal struggles or planned accomplishments. There is nothing that has not been written before. So why are we still writing stories?

Look at the size of the fiction section in a huge bookstore or library and imagine how many different stories are told between the covers. Even the largest and best stocked stores will carry less than half-a-percent of all the currently available books out there. Then, for every book that’s still available, there are at least another 50 that aren’t. Then there are the books written in other languages to consider. With so many stories, how can there be anything left to write?

But there is an upside to this over-crowded market. With all the selection out there, it’s next to impossible for us to read everything. With all the authors out there, it’s a rare occasion when we find a new favourite. Anyone can write something on paper, but can they make that paper speak to us?

So to anybody that is writing a book, or has finished one and would like to see it published, just remember to forget. Forget about everyone else and what they’ve written about. Just because somebody told a similar tale doesn’t mean that you can’t do a better job. Heck, if bloggers never wrote about the same topic as another there would probably be just a few dozen of us online.

How boring would that be?