“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

~ Ecclesiastes 1:9

Greetings from the edge,

It has been argued, by storytellers far more prolific and qualified than I, that there are really only a handful of stories humans keep telling over and over again.

Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots famously boiled them down into seven broad categories:

• Overcoming the Monster
• Rags to Riches
• The Quest
• Voyage and Return
• Rebirth
• Comedy
• Tragedy

That idea has haunted writing advice for decades. Entire shelves groan under the weight of books trying to explain story structure, archetypes, and why humans keep rearranging the same emotional furniture in slightly different ways.

I still own a battered copy of Ronald B. Tobias’ 20 Master Plots, bought for 50p from a second-hand bookshop in the late 90s that could only be described as mildly eldritch.

But recently, I decided to go all the way back to the source.

The oldest surviving work of literature we possess, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates back roughly four thousand years and begins with the words:

“In ancient times…”

Think about that for a moment.

Human civilisation had only just figured out writing, and already somebody was looking backwards nostalgically and saying:

“Things were different back then.”

That absolutely breaks my brain.

Not because it makes ancient people feel distant, but because it makes them feel terrifyingly familiar. The same nostalgia. The same anxieties. The same obsession with heroes, monsters, friendship, death, and the awful certainty that everything changes.

Which raises an uncomfortable question:

If there are only so many plots, and somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 novels are published every year in English alone…

Aren’t we eventually going to run out of stories?

Short answer: no.

Long answer…

The Fear of Unoriginality

Read enough books, or watch enough films, and eventually you’ll notice something unsettling:

Almost everything has been done before.

Maybe not in exactly the same way, sure, but the bones are often recognisable. Without Lord of the Flies, we might never have gotten Battle Royale, and without Battle Royale, we almost certainly wouldn’t have The Hunger Games.

One island. Some frightened children. A catastrophic lack of adult supervision.

That formula alone helped build a franchise worth billions.

And sooner or later, every writer or creative runs headfirst into the same horrible realisation:

“Oh, bugger. Somebody already did this.”

If you write fantasy, then welcome to Tolkien’s shadow. Over roughly half a million words, J. R. R. Tolkien more or less established the modern language of high fantasy: ancient evils, reluctant heroes, maps in the front of books, and enough walking to qualify as a sponsored charity event.

If science fiction is your thing, then the ghosts of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Gene Roddenberry are waiting patiently to be compared to your work.

Honestly, as a lifelong Philip K. Dick fanboy (a Dick-head some might say), somebody once describing The Echo Man as “a bit Philip K. Dick-ish” absolutely made my day.

Horror writers fare no better. Every haunted house creaks with echoes of H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. Every cursed forest, forbidden tome, or thing scratching at the bedroom window arrives carrying decades of literary baggage behind it like a corpse tied to a horse.

But maybe that’s the point.

Creativity has always been part recycling, part reinvention. We borrow. We remix. We repaint old machinery in new colours and pretend nobody notices the engine underneath.

And occasionally, if the stars align and the muse finally gets off their arse, somebody makes something new enough to begin the cycle all over again.

Humans Recycle Emotional DNA

Human beings have been recycling ideas since our Neanderthal cousins were turning cave bear bones into flutes.

But storytelling is where our pack-rat instincts really take over.

Stories mutate across generations, cultures, and mediums, but their emotional cores keep resurfacing:

• revenge
• love
• hubris
• survival
• transformation

The costumes change. The emotional machinery doesn’t.

Romeo and Juliet becomes West Side Story, then gets reborn again as futuristic dystopias, anime romances, and stories about lovers trapped on opposite sides of impossible divides.

The works of William Shakespeare have echoed through culture for so long that entire genres are still quietly rearranging furniture he helped build centuries ago.

And The Epic of Gilgamesh? Strip away the clay tablets and Bronze Age gods, and you can still see its fingerprints all over modern superhero stories. Extraordinary figures wrestling with mortality, friendship, legacy, and what it means to become more than human.

Even superheroes endlessly recycle each other’s DNA.

Iron Man is essentially Batman with a better wardrobe and functioning social skills. Without Deathstroke, we probably never get Deadpool, and an entire generation of smart-mouthed, fourth-wall-breaking antiheroes might never have existed.

Different mask.

Same skull underneath.

The Internet Changed Pattern Recognition

What if the problem isn’t that we’re running out of plots, character arcs, or settings?

What if we’ve simply become better at recognising them?

The really interesting shift is in how we consume stories now. Between online archives, fan wikis, Reddit deep-dives, and sprawling trope databases, modern audiences can dissect fiction with forensic precision.

There is, quite literally, a website cataloguing storytelling devices so obsessively that it can point you toward every example of a character waking up inside a dream, simulation, or coma fantasy. TV Tropes cheerfully calls this:

“Adventures in Comaland.”

We have, in many ways, turned storytelling into butterfly pinning.

The internet connected the world’s fandoms together almost overnight. A Pokémon fan in Tokyo can analyse lore with another fan in Tallahassee in seconds. Entire communities now exist to examine franchises frame by frame, line by line, trope by trope.

And while our ability to analyse stories has evolved, the sheer amount of media we consume has exploded too.

In the 1970s, roughly 10,000 films were produced worldwide. By the 2000s, that number had surged past 34,000. Book publishing grew even faster. In the United States alone, annual publishing output jumped from around 40,000 books in 1970 to well over 280,000 by 2009.

That’s an astonishing amount of storytelling.

So it’s not just that we can now see the machinery more clearly.

There’s also far, far more machinery to look at.

Originality Might Be Combination

Here is where a little light finally starts creeping under the door.

It doesn’t really matter that there may only be a handful of plots, a stack of recurring archetypes, and enough books published each year to bury a small village.

The chances of your own 50,000 word baby being completely unique in every possible way are vanishingly small.

But maybe that was never the point.

Take colour for example. Nobody is out there inventing entirely new colours. Human beings can perceive millions of shades, but we still reduce them to a relatively small set of basic colour terms: red, blue, green, yellow and so on.

Yet people still create unique and astonishing works of art every day.

Nobody looks at a painting and says:

“Nice try, mate, but somebody already used blue in 1642.”

Because originality was never about inventing new pigments. It was always about what you do with them.

The same thing applies to stories.

Your voice, that strange little id sitting behind the wheel, your lived experiences, your sense of humour, and all the odd little things that make you you combine into something nobody else can fully replicate.

Think about it for a moment.

Imagine Star Wars directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Imagine Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone written by Stephen King.

The same ingredients.

Wildly different meals.

A tweet I saw years ago has lodged itself permanently in my brain:

“Misery would have been a very different book if Annie Wilkes had kidnapped Jack Torrance.”

And it absolutely would have.

Probably with considerably more axes.

Summary

The oldest story we have on record begins by looking back longingly at ancient times. Thousands of years later, despite all our advances in technology and storytelling, we’re still doing exactly the same thing.

Originality was never about creating something nobody had ever seen before. Maybe it’s about taking the same torch people have carried for thousands of years and holding it at a slightly different angle against the dark.

See you in the margins,