Did you know that when there’s gloom in the gloaming, that’s when doom goes a-roaming? I recently dug up five chapters of a planned, but mercifully uncompleted, fantasy novel I was writing in high school. It was hopelessly derivative (my ringwraiths were called, um, ringlords), but hey, I was fifteen or thereabouts.
Feast your eyes on the deathless literary milestone that is Druidstone Quest: The Sword of the Highlands! 😮
You’re a brave man to post your worst on here ( :
This is still better writing than I’ve seen from any recent 15 year olds.
Still better than Tad Williams.
I’ve heard somewhere there are only a few archetypal “stories”, so logically anything any fiction writer writes must be derivative.
@ Anon73:
It was Georges Polti who wrote the book The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations wherein he postulated that all drama could be boiled down to a finite number of situations. I think the theory is nonsense, he couldn’t even keep his 36 from overlapping each other. The book however is good for breaking writer’s block and inspires one to check out the ancient (read Greek) playwrights.
@ Long:
Almost every geek has a Tolkien ripoff in their past. However I thought I was the only one who had actually gone to the trouble of making a map.
I think Polti cheats a bit, in that not all of his situations are at the same level of generality. Some are fairly specific (like “abduction” or “misplaced jealousy”), while others are so general that they apply to all sorts of different plots (like “daring enterprise” or “solving an enigma”).
I guess Robert Jordan was the opposite of Roderick in that he chose to impose his hopelessly derivative stuff on the world by writing more than 10 thick volumes of it. 🙂