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Stop me if you've heard this one before.
So a guy--and it's always a guy, an everyman guy, a kind of pathetic but technically competent youngish average normal guy-- is trying really hard to succeed as a solo narrative storyteller, but his efforts are just not working out for him. But suddenly, the draft or outline or first chapter of a REALLY GREAT STORY falls into his lap. So... He takes that draft, finishes it, and passes it off as his own. And it's the greatest success the world has ever known! Except eventually his lie catches up to him and he faces the consequences of his actions. Woe is him. The end.
I've always found these premises kind of confusing, because I don't think the concept is always better than the execution. Maybe because I read so much fanfiction which is all riffing on the same few plots. Some coffeeshop meet cute AUs stand head and shoulders above other coffeeshop meet cutes (there's a reason no one ever shuts up about Jaywalkers, still, to this day.) And it's not because Le Petit Whatever is a more compelling cafe than a Starbucks, it's because AO3 user batman's writing style is polished and elegant and memorable in a way most prose, fanfic or otherwise, just isn't.
In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, the Plot our protagonist steals from a guy in a writing workshop is repeatedly described by everyone as the most brilliant and exciting and extreme plot twist the world has ever seen, which naturally ensured that whenever it was finally revealed it would be a disappointment. I guessed the book-within-a-book twist about fifty pages ahead of the reveal myself, which is saying something considering I'm usually more of a mystery enjoyer than a solver. What made The Plot really work for me overall, though, is that the final late game twist of the frame story around the fictional plagiarism actually did go in a direction I didn't fully expect, which was pretty dark and horrifying! And funny. A little awkwardly funny, but still funny. I also did feel like the main character's creative struggles and mindset were understandable and believable. I enjoyed it, overall.
This premise didn't work so well in the short-lived Shonen Jump manga Time Paradox Ghostwriter by Kenji Ichima and Tsunehiro Date. In TPG, Teppei is a young mangaka assistant dreaming of serialization, but editors are constantly slamming his stories down as derivative and creatively empty. Suddenly his microwave starts spitting out Shonen Jump magazines from ten years in the future. Believing this to be a weird dream, he copies the first chapter of a new story from the future Jump to the best of his ability and submits it. And it becomes a huge success! Except the girl who drew that future first chapter, Itsuki, sees Teppei's debut, and tracks him down... To tell him how thrilled she is that she's not the only one who could come up with that basic premise???
The central theme of TPG, counter to the repeated maxims of "everyone has a story to tell" deconstructed in The Plot and Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort, is that some people really are creatively empty and incapable of creating truly original stories. Which I fundamentally disagree with. If your work seems derivative you need to a) diversify your creative input b) figure out a message besides Have Fun and c) yeah, look inside yourself and your life experiences a little. Your manga looks too much like other manga? Go read some Asterix, or X-men, or Berlin by Jason Lutes. See a play. Take a knitting class. Read prose. It's not an unsolvable problem, and the reason it seems like it to these characters is because they're young and lacking in life experience and perspective. Which I guess I am too, but at least I'm aware of it. Just pair up with a writer like the creators of this comic did.
I think this frustrates me so much because I've never had a problem coming up with ideas for comics, I've just been struggling to execute them effectively for the past decade. I'm desperate to improve my drawing skills to a point where I can get published as a writer and artist, but it feels like nothing I do will get me there. But ideas are easy! It's the execution that's hard!
The Plot and Last Resort had one big thing in common TPG didn't: the protagonists didn't just plagiarize someone else's fictional story, they plagiarized real events that happened to someone else, and that had consequences for their lives. But the manga in TPG appears to be a standard shonen fighter fantasy story, not narratively groundbreaking in any way obvious to the readers of the manga outside the manga. Both Itsuki and Teppei only want to make popular manga everyone can enjoy, not tell a specific story or communicate something to the world, which makes me wonder what exactly makes their comic so super amazing anyway. Caleb in Last Resort wanted to be recognized for his skill as a novelist more than anything else. Jake in The Plot had been recognized as a novelist once already with a well-regarded if not bestselling first book and was desperate for a career reset. I feel like that kind of egoism is a little more honest and believable than the altruistic goal of entertaining everyone. Maybe because I'm an egoist myself. I wanna be the very best like no one ever was, etc.
Bringing it back around to the title of this post and fanfiction, there's a lot of people who write plot-first kinda fics of worldbuilding-heavy canons, who want to "fix" BNHA by making Deku a supersmart quirkless analyst instead of shipping stuff. And a lot of those kinds of fics have potentially interesting ideas! But a lot of them also have an execution that makes me not want to look at them twice, from too many SPAG errors to giving Present Mic a speaking style like a Homestuck typing quirk (a specific fic that haunts me). A really great plot can't hit without good execution. In Last Resort, Caleb's friend Avi sends him the short story version of the story that Caleb ends up stealing for his novel, and Caleb is unimpressed with Avi's actual writing. Caleb steals it almost unintentionally, just driving up the West Coast and thinking about how he could improve the story and make it stronger. The Plot asserts that the specific plot Jake steals would be impossible to execute so badly it wouldn't become a smash hit, but by a fortunate coincidence both Jake and the guy he stole it from were already pretty good writers.
A boring plot can be a hit if the execution is interesting somehow (people like Sally Rooney, after all). A plot that's been done a zillion times can be a hit if there's something, anything about it that's slightly new. These three versions of the same story are all still different from each other, right?
So does having a great premise/concept/plot really matter that much?
