Originality in Genre Fiction

I was just over at Joe Konrath's blog, which can be found here http://jakonrath.blogspot.com.au/. His latest post is on the subject of million dollar ideas, and it really got me thinking. He should be proud of this because not much can achieve this these days.

The concept of a truly original idea came to me when I was a teenager who played guitar in a rock band many, many years ago. It didn't take me long to graduate from learning to tune a battered old acoustic with a warped neck and nylon strings. My playing sounded like a cross between a harpsichord and a banjo, but I soon bought my first electric guitar and started writing my own songs - such is the learning capacity of the young. I was excited, but I soon discovered that just about whatever I wrote had been written before, usually by Lennon and McCartney.

Writing books presents a similar problem, and the more books that are published the worse this problem is going to become. Some genres don't demand originality at all, although it can help. Romance springs to mind, here. I admit that I have never read a romance novel of any kind, but I have read a lot of romance novel premises, and they all seem to be just about identical to the next one. Crime is another one where very few variables are required. Corpse found, suspects introduced, suspects grilled, second corpse found, red herring introduced, murderer caught. Over and over again. The originality in this genre often comes from the location of the crimes or the detective (or killer) himself.

A genre that seems to demand more originality is certainly the technothriller, but it doesn't come easy because so many great writers have "got there first". Thanks to the laws of physics that govern the passage of time, it was easier for a writer to pen an original technothriller in 1980 than it is in 2013. If cosmologists are right and the universe really will start contracting again back to an infinite point, I guess one day it might be the other way round and someone could write Jurassic Park before Michael Crichton (hang on, time running backwards... an original technothriller idea....?.... I doubt it - it almost certainly exists already, somewhere, and that is the problem).

As I point out in Joe Konrath's blog, literary fiction is more forgiving to those who want to write original fiction, but genre readers demand certain conventions are met, and that is the problem. Ultimately, original concepts are getting harder to find as more and more are successfully mined and published, but that is different from an original plot and original characters, which are easier to achieve. One concern I have with seeking total originality is that it can lead to absolutely ridiculous stories. For example, we could be pretty original if, in the style of a 1950s B movie, we wrote a book called Attack of the Killer Hot Water Bottles, or The Day The Flying Washing Machines Came To Earth. The difficulty is creating a concept that is not derivative or ridiculous and we can all say this is impossible until the next one gets published, and we'll a shout "why didn't I think of that?"