Remember seeing the Matrix for the first time? How incredibly annoyed you were at the hackneyed plot? No? Just me?
Ahem. Yeah, I was the only person in my friend group to leave the movie saying, “That was sooo lame. It’s a plot from a thousand old stories and twilight zone episodes! This movie will be forgotten fast.”
Let’s check the score. Ah, yes: Matrix 1, Marie 0.
The Matrix was a movie that touched a lot of people despite its plot “having been done before.” It amazed with new advances in special effects and slick visual stylings that would affect action movies for a generation. Also, to young-me’s consternation, not everyone had read those old stories or seen that old Twilight Zone episode.
My cranky pedantry against it at the time was not just my own poor judgement, it was me being pretty basic. “That’s been done” is one of the most thoughtless and common complaints people make about a work of fiction.
“A selkie story? Again?”
“Meh, it was just another superhero movie.”
“Is this an epiphany story? How cliché!”
The thing of it is, no story is exactly its plot, or exactly its speculative element, or exactly its twist. If that were the case, we’d all be done the first time we read a book with a vampire, or a detective solving crimes, or a romance between the two people who hate each other at first. That is the exact opposite of true as I just described three well-selling genres of stories.
The truth is, we rather like hearing the same stories over and over. It’s always satisfying when the found family comes together or the bad guy turns good or the hero discovers that the real treasure was the friends he made along the way.
Or not, of course, depends on your tastes, but there are loads of story-types as there are loads of readers. What really matters is: did the story make you feel? Chances are, if you are rolling your eyes at it having “been done” it’s because the story is failing to make you feel.
I remember once at a mandatory customer-service training (ugh customer service) the speaker told us, “If you don’t like someone, how they hold their spoon will irritate you. If you like them, they can spill their soup in your lap and you’ll forgive them.” It was something about being friendly to customers, but it still has a ring of truth. If a story moves you, emotionally, you won’t care even if it is full of typos and clichés.
So don’t worry about doing something that has been done.
Heh. Worry about moving people emotionally. Oof. That’s hard enough.
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