Position:Home>Books & Authors> Is my plot about a vampire unoriginal? ?
Question: Is my plot about a vampire unoriginal!? !?
For those that like vampires, how do you feel about another one!? Too repetitive!? Is it possible to have another one and still be unoriginal!? I want to write a book, I have a character who feels tormented about being what he is (not necessarily a vampire!?) and feels evil because all his life he has been told he is evil and wants to be a good "person" but he can't get over his need for evil (in a vampire's case: need for blood)!. Can this be original!? Should I scrap the vampire idea and subsitute another problem!? Trouble is I can't think of anything else!.!.!.major writer's block!.
Oh and if you want to help, the point of this character is to show the gray areas and make you think the good guy is the bad guy and the "bad guy" is good and bad, and villified for being what he is and asking if what he does is wrong!? If that makes any sense!? LOL I need a plot!Www@QuestionHome@Com
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
Sorry, it is unoriginal!. I think you should scrap the vampire idea!. Usually, the core of vampire literature is sexuality -- the male sucking the female's/or anyone else's blood as a sexual act!. NOT to say that all vampire stories are unoriginal!. Check out Let the Right One In, a recent Swedish movie!. Here, they go in a different direction by having kids as main characters (to ditch the sexual tension) and reversing gender roles to undermine the sexual associations!. also the vampire girl character doesn't really have any explicit moral dilemmas about being a vampire, since it is how she gets nutrition (like how most people don't feel guilty about eating meat)!.
If your main focus is showing moral complications ("grey areas") IMHO you should stick with realism!. For example, take the tv show The Wire!. That shows drug dealers, and although it never skims their crimes and atrocities, it also shows that the drug dealers grew up in crimes, are emotionally and mentally used to it, and need it support their lives!. Sometimes crime shows also show the criminals desperately attempting to flee the authorities, which catches you off guard and makes you want to the criminal to escape!. Showing moral conflicts without obvious metaphors or parallels to reality in fantasy often comes across as melodramatic!. And stuff in the vampire genre is almost always melodramatic!.
The problem with the vampire genre is that it's too Victorian and melodramatic (the Victorians loved melodrama)!. Vampires were originally pictured as plump and ruddy (this is because old timey peope would find corpses who would be bloated and red, with blood coming out of their cavities [this happens to corpses sometimes] and thought that the corpse got fatter because it was feeding on blood)!. Thanks to Anne Rice and Victorians (and also some thanks goes to the romantics) the vampire genre is now overladen with sexual overtones in violence and more matches Succubus/ Incubus myths than anything about undead parasitic creatures!.
However, it's your writing and your should write it as you want to!. You asked for an opinion and here's mine!. If you're having trouble coming up with a plot maybe try to think about what gets you emotionally charged up!. Or you could take something interesting or exciting that happened to you and manipulate or exaggerate it to make it fictional!. For example, Tolkien was in the war, and he also like medieval literature and languages a lot!. So he kind of combined medieval sociology (kings, warriors, swords), norse myth (kalevala) and his own experiences of the war to make a mythic war-based fantasy!. There are also a lot of very simple plots that appear very striking!. Madame Bovary is about a cheating housewife but it kinda shows how people can never get enough and be satisfied!. Lolita is basically about a pedophile but it constantly focuses on Humbert Humbert obsessive transcendental lust for some lost fairytale-kingdom creature!. Plotting really isn't even the main part of storytelling since you can have an awesome and exciting sequence of events but if you can't convey it properly it fails (this is the problem with me most of the time)!.
Oh jeez I kinda get carried away!. Anyways, just let yourself go and write whatever you want to!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
Have you read the Twilight series!? If you have, there is a part in the first book about Carlisle, and how he tried to survive without drinking human blood for the first part of his "life" as a vampire!. It sounds like you would be writing a book about that!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
The plot about denying himself may be a tad unoriginal, but definately write a vampire novel!. there's not enough of them! hahaWww@QuestionHome@Com
no it is good!.
Www@QuestionHome@Com