Stories We’ve Seen Too Often | Hacker News Reader

Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

strangehorizons.com

136 pointsddougj98 comments

If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much.

Once you subtract the ones that are either just straight-up wish fulfillment, or otherwise reliant on racist/sexist/ageist stereotypes, a lot of the ideas listed here are still perfectly good ideas for a story. They'd be more than "original" enough to drive an episode of Black Mirror or the plot of a mainstream blockbuster movie - areas where originality isn't as important as executing the concept in a way that has market appeal (and is hopefully also high quality).

The issue is more just that the audience for these stories are the editors of a speculative fiction magazine, and readers of that same relatively niche speculative fiction magazine. That is, people who spend a lot of time reading fiction. They, in particular, have seen all this stuff before. After a while, if your whole job is reading stories, of course you're going to get tired of even very good stories about things you've seen a hundred times before.

There's plenty of other places to submit to. If you have confidence in your work and you think your story is worth people reading, but this list suggests these particular editors won't like it... just send it somewhere else.

Hasn't it been said there's only 7 basic stories in the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots or something.

But who cares that The Lion King and Hamlet may be the same story at the base, they're certainly different enough to be enjoyable each in their own right, and I wouldn't substitute one for the other in some strange form of economization.

See also: Soviet folklorist Vladimr Propp identified 7 typical characters and 31 basic structural elements in fairy tales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp#Narrative_struc...

Another interesting classification discovered from Propp's Wikipedia entry: Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of folktale types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%9...

I have thought that Sci-Fi / speculative fiction stories are in a really good position to be categorised by something similar to Aarne–Thompson–Uther index.

Consider some basic stories like:

* a person travels backwards through time to prevent a tragedy.

  - By doing so they cause the tragedy to occur.

  - On returning to their own time they discover the tragedy was necessary for their society.

* a person travels backwards in time to meet their hero.

  - they discover the person didn’t exist and become them.
 
  - they discover the person isn’t as heroic as they hoped and coach them.

Just four examples, but I’m sure you can see how many stories fit into each.

The wiki article left off Vonnegut's take on this

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/vonnegut-shapes/

>> If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much.

I don't. I'm thinking "damn, my stories are too weird and nobody will understand what's going on, or why".

There is something to be said bout a good, old-fashioned, cliché (pronounced "clee-chaeye", not "clitch"). I think the best story I ever wrote was about... dragons.

Dragons.

Cliche me now.

I seem to have understood that this list is about things that would get rejected when they're the sole point of the story, but they'd be fine as plot devices within a more fleshed out narrative structure.

Even then, I can recall very good reads (or watches) that could readily fit squarely in one of those boxes but are either very well executed that you either don't see it coming, or even if you do you continue nonetheless, or that have specific context or otherwise build up that makes it very good even if it can be narratively distilled down to a simple this or that.

Also also, this list seems extremely small when compared to tvtropes.org with which, when I catch myself running down that time sink again, I always end up thinking that every single plot has already been written though sheer bruteforce.

IOW _execution_ also matters.

The list seems to cover 90% of all sci-fi, and, if you squint a little, 80% of all stories ever written.

Pure originality is exceptionally rare, but that's not really a bad thing. More and more I believe that the human experience is primarily defined by rhymes and analogy, trying to avoid reusing prior work is futile.

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9, RSV2CE).

I think you are right, but also, that it is totally legitimate for Strange Horizons to say "we really really want only original work." So long as they don't also say "only original work is valid to create", which is where I (and maybe they, given the disclaimers) take issue with this list.

Since Strange Horizons publishes far less than 10% of all science fiction, that seems fine.

I wonder if some stories work well with the peer group of authors/editors, but not so much with audeiences.

For example, it's annoying to me as a reader when stories are straight-up rewrites of say the odyssey or hakespeare, or put greek/roman gods in our universe. (same with computer games that are hex based and show the hexes, or card-based games that show the cards)

I also think you could cover 90% of these just by watching Star Trek.

Something that stuck out to me was a side-note:

> Note that we do like endings that we didn't expect, as long as they derive naturally from character action.

This, to me, is probably the biggest thing that makes me hate a story:

The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we'd expect them to act based on what we've seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only to move the plot to a specific ending or scene.

This is a big problem for serialized stories now that fan theorizing on the internet is so common. A good plot shouldn't be completely predictable to your audience, but events need to flow from one to the other because characters and their worlds should have consistency. This creates predictability and means some small percentage of your audience can now guess what is going to happen.

That was fine a decade or two ago when a person might guess the ending to a TV show and blurt it out to their partner on the couch. However, now that small group that guesses the plot correctly will share their predictions on the relevant subreddit which will be picked up by blogs and suddenly everyone knows where you were going.

When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled. Westworld is a memorable example of the creators changing the show because fans guessed what was happening next. The end result was that the show didn't make any sense because it prioritized unpredictability over all else and eventually the world and characters didn't make any sense anymore.

Show runners and writers giving a shit that someone on Reddit guessed their clever twist is the entire problem here. If zero people out of thousands or more actively speculating online thought of the thing you did, that's probably because it doesn't make sense. Adjusting to avoid anything that's been guessed almost necessarily means veering into bad writing.

>Show runners and writers giving a shit that someone on Reddit guessed their clever twist

This is what ruined Westworld.

> When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled.

I disagree wholeheartedly.

The big problem with every single writer nowadays is a complete and total inability to stick the ending.

I'm really trying very hard to come up with a TV show, book or movie that I thought really stuck the ending in the last 10 years (I'm being generous--in reality I'd even say 30 years). A whole host of the fan theories are WAY better than what practically all current writers crap out.

If I'm being charitable, I'll describe the problem as writers lack varied life experience. If I'm being uncharitable, it's that most writers are just not very intelligent.

I recommend The Good Place throughout, particularly the ending.

I could give you a list of endings that I thought were great, but if you can’t think of a single ending that you found satisfying, that sounds more like a you problem than all of humanity simply stopped writing good endings.

Seems akin to complaints that there aren't enough good movies or TV shows these days.

That's so very not the case that the person complaining either isn't looking very hard, or else have such narrow taste that they're excluding most works without even considering them.

Breaking Bad had a very decent ending. It wasn't overblown, it didn't have contrived plot twists, and it was consistent with the the way the characters behaved in previous arcs.

„Bodyguard“, the BBC miniseries, and „My Name“ from South Korea, both on Netflix, as well as „Your Name“, from 2016 (now THAT was one final act and ending!).

I like slg's reply (most likely somewhere above mine!)

I just want to add: what's an example of something you think is a really good ending, from any book or show or movie from any time?

>The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we'd expect them to act based on what we've seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only to move the plot to a specific ending or scene.

Bone (the comic) is a masterpiece, but then, in the last pages, we see the main characters make a decision that goes against the last 1000 pages of their development.

My old least-favorite-trope isn't on here, maybe writers have finally stopped writing it.

> (Somehow, a man and a women end up alone on a planet. This is the last dialog.)

> Man: I never caught your name.

> Women: I'm Eve.

> Man: Hi Eve, I'm Adam.

My first encounter with this one was Alan Moore poking fun at it in 2000AD: https://64.media.tumblr.com/27760dbb610ca38e29db4551f3991cbb... (I guess it was a hoary old chestnut even back then)

> Madam, I'm Adam

Brought to you by the Palindrome SocietyteicoS emordnilaP

Wow. Mind blown! /s

If you liked this list, you may also find the Turkey City Lexicon interesting:

https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer...

It's also aimed directly at aspiring science fiction writers, but it's been referenced enough times on Charles Stross's blog (and other SF venues) that some of its terms have entered my vocabulary and that of other SF readers I know.

EDIT: this list does contain the story type lifefeed mentions in a sibling content.

- Adam and Eve Story

Nauseatingly common subset of the “Shaggy God Story” in which a terrible apocalypse, spaceship crash, etc., leaves two survivors, man and woman, who turn out to be Adam and Eve, parents of the human race!!

That second introduction to the TC Lexicon describes - exactly! - the process used in a poetry workshop I attended back in the late 80s[1]. The outcome of each session was also the same, drowning our sorrows in a nearby pub after the meeting, but also forming some strong and long-lasting bonds with our fellow masochists. I'd say I learned 80% of what I know about writing poetry from that workshop, and un-learned 100% of what I thought I knew before I started.

[1] Poetry in the Making, led by Laurie Smith at the City Lit - the critique was brutal, but worth it in the end! https://www.citylit.ac.uk/

Neal Stevenson got away with this by getting rid of Adam and adding six additional Eve's.

He also got away with it by not making it a sudden twist at the end; it was never a surprise - it's the title of the book.

I was left in suspense how seven eyes fit in until I reread the title after reading the book...

I have the old (1975) book "Writing And Selling Science Fiction" by Science Fiction Writers of America (ie various).

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1739693

and it has lots of good advice. Pretty sure it has the Adam and Eve Trope.

"As you know, Bob..." crops up in just about everything Neal Stephenson does, although I've always thought it's better framed as "Right, I had to learn a *lot* about 17th Century French Naval vessels / encryption / diving equipment / evolutionary biology / the semiotics of theology / whatever else, so now *you* get to learn it too!"

I actually quite like those bits.

‘1984’ and ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ get around this by just having longish excerpts from a book that’s important to the plot. And these bits are really good.

To be entirely fair

> Scientist uses himself or herself as test subject.

This is very real plot that even got some people Nobel prize

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2005/press-releas...

Interview with some details

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPLA69a5OOU

also surely “scientist experiments on themselves” is far too broad to dismiss out of hand

I don't think any in the list are dismissals. If you remove every item, you're left with nothing that can be said about anything in scifi. The items also include plots used by acknowledged authors in celebrated stories.

This is like TV Tropes: a trope is neither good nor bad, it just is. It can be overused, it can be subverted, it can be played straight or played with, but the one thing you cannot do: avoid tropes entirely.

I’m not suggesting tropes are bad or good in themselves, I’m just suggesting that the tone of this article is pretty dismissive

Right, misread your comment. Yes, the article is a bit dismissive, and I think it's a mistake on the author(s) part.

Might as well go to the authority for recycled story bits: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tropes There is more to storytelling than just originality.

Besides TV tropes, the page made me think of the quite entertaining "How Not to Write a Novel"[1][2], which not only details tropes to avoid, but also quite humorously illustrates them with short stories.

If you're already a TV Tropes addict, I can strongly recommend the book.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HowNotToWr...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Write-Novel-Them-Misstep-Misstep/dp/0...

For those who haven't been to TV Tropes, be warned, you will be there for a long time. It's a wiki-walk of nearly infinite depth.

Now, if anyone needs me for the next 3 weeks, you'll know where to find me. :)

Exactly. Originality is overrated.

Tropes exist. What matters is what you build with them.

> This is not a canonical list of bad stories or story cliches. This is a list of types of stories that we at SH have seen too often; it's not intended to be a complete list of all types of bad stories, nor are all the items on the list necessarily bad.

>30. Brutal violence against women is depicted in loving detail, often in a story that's ostensibly about violence against women being bad.

Finally, a perfectly succinct explanation for why I can't stand watching The Handmaid's Tale.

The book is much better than the show, but both examine what living in a Christian-facist state would look like. The graphic depictions serve as a warning: “this won’t be fun.” It’s kind of scary how prescient the book is.

I still say there is very little daylight between The Handmaid's Tale and any random Gor novel. The only difference is in the Gor universe the guys are actually enjoying it.

SO many tv shows are just gore porn. It's horrible when you think how much murder and sexual assault we all witness on a near daily basis via the tv shows we watch. That baggage is being carried around in our head somewhere.

The amusing thing is how many of the items on their list bring to mind a great short story, or a great novel, or movie. Point being that many of them CAN be good, but usually aren't.

> is how many of the items on their list bring to mind a great short story

That may be how so many of these ended up on this list: someone wrote a great story with an original premise, and lots of other people are like "Oh, I like that idea, I'll write my own story using a similar idea", and then editors get sick of receiving them.

Almost all in the list can be used in good stories. And have been used, in fact.

This is a list of tropes. Tropes are neither good or bad, they just are (well, some tropes are obviously bad or outdated, but you get my meaning).

Might as well claim that using words in text is bad.

As an aside, I really like the disclaimer's approach, kind of like the Disney+ messages on certain movies, where they say they don't necessarily agree with something but still present it in the original form.

To me, it was a little disconcerting, like "we've stopped receiving these things too much, people got the message, and now we're receiving other things too much, but aren't going to update this to tell you what they are, and are leaving it for posterity."

Maybe there aren't new overdone stories, people see the list and stop. But that seems unlikely to me. In either case, it would be nice if there was a list that was updated, or some statement about things being better.

It's just an old list some editors put together for fun, there's no requirement to regularly update something you made a decade ago. If anything, I'd say there's an obligation to keep the original text available as long as you're maintaining the website. I don't find any of this disconcerting.

I’m a fiction writer and I don’t have such expectations of this list.

Some publishers have a short list of things they don’t take due to having too many submitted. I don’t think that’s what this list it. For one it is far too detailed to keep updated.

I see this list as a subset of bad storytelling they were seeing often. It’s not a subset of things they didn’t accept. (There is significant overlap.) It’s an important distinction.

Lists like these get published occasionally and they become part of the history of the internet. They truly are a snapshot in time.

I wish I could ask Netfix/recommendation engines to strike stories matching a certain story profile. In particular I rarely enjoy a story about point 4. I like watching something without spoilers so avoiding 'Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real' is really difficult.

I wish that recommendation engines had a "rational fiction score" for their content. Things like Expanse, Sanderson's Mistborn series (were it to be filmed as a show, ah, one can dream) or 2001 Odyssey would rate highly, things like "From..." not so much.

Most of these are all plots of successful movies or TV shows.

* Creative person is having trouble creating. Creative person meets a muse...

Xanadu, the movie.

* Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real.

About half of Twilight Zone episodes.

* An AI gets loose on the Net, but the author doesn't have a clear concept of what it means for software to be "loose on the Net."

Terminator

* Technology and/or modern life turn out to be soulless.

"The Office"

"The Lorax"

This one goes all the way back to "The Machine Stops".

* Bad person is told they'll get the reward that they "deserve," which ends up being something bad.

Several Twilight Zone episodes.

* Person is floating in a formless void; in the end, they're born.

"2001"

* Person uses time travel to achieve some particular result, but in the end something unexpected happens that thwarts their plan.

That one really has been done to death in SF.

* A mysteriously-named Event is about to happen ("Today was the day Jimmy would have to report for The Procedure"), but the nature of the Event isn't revealed until the end of the story, when it turns out to involve death or other unpleasantness. [Several classic sf stories use this approach, which is one reason we're tired of seeing it. Another reason is that we can usually guess the twist well ahead of time, which makes the mysteriousness annoying.]

This is the plot of the New Testament.

* In the future, an official government permit is required in order to do some particular ordinary thing, but the specific thing a permit is required for isn't (usually) revealed until the end of the story.

That was a 1950s thing, and seems to have died out.

* Someone calls technical support; wacky hijinx ensue. Someone calls technical support for a magical item.

"Oh My Goddess" anime

> * A mysteriously-named Event is about to happen ("Today was the day Jimmy would have to report for The Procedure"), but the nature of the Event isn't revealed until the end of the story, when it turns out to involve death or other unpleasantness. [Several classic sf stories use this approach, which is one reason we're tired of seeing it. Another reason is that we can usually guess the twist well ahead of time, which makes the mysteriousness annoying.]

This is also the plot of an amazing short story called The Icarus Gland. It's written by a Russian author, and all of the translations are terrible. But, even with the terrible translation, it still captivates and keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Well, that's the whole point of that list, innit. They are pointing out the kind of stories that have been done to death, so that people stop doing them to death, already.

Terminator was obviously culminating in Judgement Day, but Kyle Reese had something to say about that.

Of course, all this is because everything has been done. Read Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales". Read one story half way, and ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right.

In 1483, there was so little published entertainment that plot twists were unnecessary.

I think what happened is that writing and even publishing has become democratised, in a sense. In the sense that there are many more people alive today, than in Chaucher's time, that can write, and that want to write (because they love reading, or even writing) and that can do it reasonably well, and get their writings published. Inevitably, the majority of those people will not come up with the most original stories, or the best writing, inevitably the majority of what is written will not be the best of what is written. Duh.

So it's not like there's fewer stories to tell now, it's just there's more people writing and 90% of everything is dross, as ever since the dawn of time.

Seen another way, in Chaucer's time you had to be Chaucer to write, and publish. Nowadays, anyone can write and publish. Inevitably, quality degrades, and originality degrades.

> In 1483, there was so little published entertainment that plot twists were unnecessary.

Well, history repeats itself with the self-published kindle stuff.

Some of the reviews even have a vocabulary, like OP MC (over-powered main character) etc

> 10. Someone calls technical support; wacky hijinx ensue.

> a. Someone calls technical support for a magical item.

> b. Someone calls technical support for a piece of advanced technology.

This one seems appealing. Are there any good books with this theme?

It's a running theme in some of John Scalzi's short fiction. I believe several can be found searching his blog, but the easiest place to find them are probably his collections. A couple were adapted as shorts in the anthology animated series "Love, Death, and Robots" (Netflix Original) most notably the Emmy-winning short "Automated Customer Service".

Similar theme: Service Call by Philip K Dick - in the fourth volume of short stories called "Minority Report".

  Sir, I'm the repairman you asked for; I'm here to fix your swibble.

Yes, contains tropes, but still brilliantly written. Easier to be novel in 1955!?

The book has a bunch more great short stories - old school but good school.

Magical Help Desk was a COVID-era LARP where you could call in and get tech support for your magic items.

https://www.intramersive.com/magical-help-desk

The classic essay on this subject is "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" in "The Language of the Night", by Ursula LeGuin.

Pretty much all of my favorite pulp sci-fi stories use at least two of the items on the list. Of course, that's reasonably forgivable because:

1. They used more than one

2. They were published long before this list was made.

3. Pulp

[edit]

e.g. 5,271,009 by Alfred Bester hits at least 4 of these while also poking fun at various wish-fulfillment stories

Also, several of them are ridiculously broad.

If you remember the original premise of Seinfeld it was:

No hugging, no changing.

So he was reversing the standard (by then) TV trope of "characters learn from their mistakes, hug each other, the end."

Of course, "no hugging, no changing" itself is a trope.

What Strange Horizons really wants is a high-quality SF/F/Horror story.

They see hundreds or thousands of low-quality stories for every high-quality story. And nobody wants to be told that the reason that they aren't being published is that their story sucks.

But everyone sane can see that their story might have been done before, perhaps too often -- so it doesn't hurt as much to be told that your story is being rejected because it's on this list.

These are called tropes, and there is a wiki about them: https://tvtropes.org/

You MADMAN! Don't drop that link without the associated warning:

WARNING: You will lose HOURS on this site.

There has to be some irony that this list of plot points has been done so many times, from Campbell's hero's journey, Vonnegut's shapes, TV tropes, etc.

And still we enjoyed it.

I am sure some English professor somewhere is gnashing his teeth saying something about here's another analysis he doesn't need to see...

> Fatness is used as a signal of evil, dissolution, and/or moral decay, usually with the unspoken assumption that it's completely obvious that fat people are immoral and disgusting.

My favorite novel that uses this trope has to be A Confederacy of Dunces.

"A Confederacy of Dunces" struck me much more as a chronicle of weird people and their foibles with a large dose of regional flavoring--sort of like Napoleon Dynamite but focused on a city underbelly.

I don't remember "fatness" being a signal of evil, and I don't remember any of the non-fat people being any better than the fat ones.

However, it has been quite a while since I read the novel, and I really didn't like it very much. So, my memory may be faulty, and your mileage may vary.

The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, was extremely fat, which was part of his ignoble caricature.

> The author is apparently unaware of the American constitutional amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment, and so postulates that in the future, American punishment will be extra-cruel in some unusual way.

I am also tired of following American news

I've got to admit, there's a lot of inspiration in that list. Though maybe use a couple and not make one of these the sole interesting thing about the story. Also, execution always matters.

And some of these should definitely be avoided at all costs.

Reminds me of Vonnegut on the “shapes” of stories:

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/vonnegut-shapes/

My least favourite story is "A lot of things happened to the protagonist and the world around him, but in the end everything is exactly like it was before all that".

Homer is dead, we live in linear time, can we please please have some progress for a change?

A notorious offender is Terry Pratchett's Discworld. When the world needs to change, it happens between the books. In any book, you know you will end up with the same status quo as when you started reading.

Even if we are talking about something happening off-world, the experience would completely change the character. They can't just resume being young, shy and ignorant. Even some PTSD would be better than nothing.

> A notorious offender is Terry Pratchett's Discworld

The wording implies an offense has been committed, but this is not the case.

For one, because it's false: progress happens in book in Discworld. There's a series of "industry/progress" novels that illustrate change in the Discworld.

But also, because the timelessness of Discworld is what makes it appealing. With some exceptions, you can read a lot of the novels in any order. This makes them good, not bad.

Are there any specific discworld books you’d like to highlight?

Some certainly fit into that pattern (I’m thinking specifically Soul Music and Moving Pictures) but things do evolve in the interconnected series.

Especially considering the later ‘Industrial Revolution’ stories - the Truth, Going Postal, Making Money all made some incremental changes to Ankh Morpork. The last (and sadly one of the worst) books Raising Steam had the biggest potential to change the fantasy world with the introduction of railway travel.

Equal Rites, these Rock and Opera books, one with the dragon, etc...

Sounds like pretty much every Coen Brothers movie to me, at least so far as the world not changing at the end.

Isn't that the case for most people, that they don't end up changing the world or society around them? At best maybe they helped open a hole in the dike for water to seep through for future generations.

Obviously that's not the case for superhero or chosen one stories, but true for most people in life.

Then go with a simple plot, with no bombast and no world in danger.

You’re forgetting the books specifically about the development of the post office and the railways at least.

Edit: and the police, and the telegraph

What stories are you thinking of. There are a lot of stories that fit your description except that the protagonist is usually (implicitly, often) changed in some way, they learned a lesson, they have a new perspective, etc

>> White protagonist is given wise and mystical advice by Holy Simple Native Folk.

That's Avatar ruined.

I feel like Avatar is more "White protagonist genuinely switches sides."

i thought it was more "check out this new plugin package I got for my CGI rig" heh.

A crazy number of these items seem like incel fan fics. I wonder how many crazy people send in stories about their fantasies?

> A crazy number

I found only two (#27 and #42a). There are several other unpleasant tropes about women in the list, but none of them sound particularly aligned with incel-dom.

For example, #18a seems like a fan fic for a viciously angry man going through a failed marriage or a divorce; and while such a man is a deeply unpleasant person, he by definition - having been married - is not an incel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com