A Novel Concept

*Insert shudder here*
God preserve me from such a fate. Remember boys and girls: friends don't let friends write fanfiction. Upon all that is holy and worthy of reading, PLEASE spare the world. There's enough of that dribble out there already; write your own stories.

On that note, in the absence of the ability to create anything remotely resembling poetry, I've taken to tinkering with a side project of mine: a YA novel. I tend to write stories with sci-fi/fantasy themes, largely because such stories were my literary bread and butter growing up, but I'm trying desperately to come up with something that isn't completely cliche. Granted, such a statement is probably cliche in and of itself, but that's nevertheless what I'm striving for.

As much as I love the genre, there are so many sterotypical elements that occur in any given YA fantasy novel. Ex: Young hero/heroine who is an orphan who suffers terribly at the hands of his/her guardians. He/she is really an alien or a fairy and has been "kept in the dark" about his/her heritage. He/she encounters some "magical" portal that takes him/her to another world(Thank-you, Kristin Nelson, from the Nelson Literary Agency, for your blog on THAT issue.^-^)

My goal, essentially, is to - within reason - turn every staple of the YA fantasy genre on its head. Well, maybe not every staple...I rather like a few of them. (Insert sinfully delicious villian here. Mmmm.)

The idea, though, is that readers typically expect certain conventions to be in place when they read a fantasy novel: there is a hero, a quest, and a villian to be vanquished. My question - the concept I'd love to toy with - is simply this: what happens when your hero is really a villain? When black and white aren't so wonderfully obvious? I know it's quintissential post-modernism, but I love the idea of playing with the ethics behind traditional fairy-tales. What happens when you don't instantly have magical solutions to all of your problems? When dragons are good? When knights are not? When everything you've ever known is nothing but a lie?

In the end, I suppose most of these "inversions" have been done as well. That's the trouble with writing: there's really nothing original left. Those who write masterpieces only do so because they've developed the skill to hide who they subconconciously get their ideas from. Our only hope, as writers, is that our versions of the age old stories will be uniquely compelling when told from our perspectives.