Recycling Story Elements

[Ashe Elton Parker]

This may be the post of an overtired mind, but I’ll try to keep it coherent, concise, and correctly-spelled.

I find I recycle plots to some extent. My big thing right now is building stories/series/ideas up into a Great War. I have two of these planned for one country in two different series, though how they end is rather different. (Ending one is creation of “impassable” mountains–at least if the invader wants their army to survive–in the early history of this country; and ending two, in the series I’m curently working on, is an uncrossable rift bottomed out by a river with a strong current–and flying ships and spells are either not invented yet or notably lacking in power/duration necessary for an army to cross the ravine.)

I also reuse the idea of magical power coming from deities, and/or characters with crises of faith or seeking it. These offer a bit more variety in the way of plot, thank goodness, but I’m finding myslef rather limited despite that.

Anybody else out there find yourselves recycling story elements?

Ashe Elton Parker
"Just love me, fear me, do as I say, and I will be your slave." ~ David Bowie as Jareth in Labyrinth
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Member since 1998.
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[Michael E. Walston]

These are (some of) your themes.

It’s perfectly natural to keep revisiting them. Look how many times Stephen King wrote about children and young adults early in his career.

[Linda Adams]

I’ve redrafted some old stories that didn’t quite work right. It wasn’t a revision — I didn’t go back and even look at the old stories. I just launched with the idea and created new.

I’ve also recycled research. I had done a little research on Los Angeles for a short story, so I set the same on in Los Angeles and reused the research.

[shanti]

Fun topic! I have also found myself recycling plot points, but I am terrible about recycling archetypes. I noticed not long ago that I have some need to pair some version of a wild child with a flawed mentor. Worse, the flawed mentor almost always has some healing ability or is a medical professional (depending on the context of the story) but, ultimately, is in more need of help than his young companion. I do this over and over. Genders change, settings change, plots change, the characters themselves seem very different, but the skeletons are there. Obviously, there is something here that my subconscious is trying to work out, or something that rings true to me somehow.

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