Originality
Originality isn’t easy, but it is simple: Just don’t do stuff that’s already been done.
By the time I began to write HPMOR, I had read a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction. I had seen all of my characters, all the paints in my palette, done a lot of different ways… which, in turn, tend to be somewhat standardized. There is dark!Harry, independent!Harry, the Harry who lets himself be pushed around by Hermione or Ginny; there is the corrupt Dumbledore and Dumbledore the well-meaning fool and Dumbledore who is determined to keep Harry on the railroad tracks of the fantasy novel, there is Tom Riddle the abused orphan and Tom Riddle the born psychopath and Tom Riddle the competent technician of magic…
Not as a mighty resolution, but as something I took for granted, I knew that I needed to do something with those characters that had not been done before. Harry, Professor Quirrell, Dumbledore, Hermione, Draco, Crabbe and Goyle, they all needed to be not the same person with the same character arc that my readers had read in other fanfictions. If my readers knew fanon characters who were too similar, my portrayal wouldn’t be surprising, which meant it wouldn’t be conveying new information, which meant I might as well not send the message. (That’s the Shannon Information philosophy of originality.)
I can’t describe the creative process behind my character-generation in very much detail, because it mostly consisted of waiting for my brain to come up with a suggestion that would not be rejected on grounds of unoriginality. But I can tell you about the straightforward part, which was the rejection rule, the law of continuation: Don’t do stuff that’s already been done. Any time my brain came up with something that wasn’t sufficiently new, I continued searching, because my brain didn’t mark the search as being over.
I don’t remember exactly what I thought while I was trying to decide “What will I do with Draco’s henchmen, Crabbe and Goyle?” but the process went something like this:
Crabbe and Goyle are idiots—-it’s been done, you’ve read that a dozen times before.
Okay, try inverting the cliche: Crabbe and Goyle are secret masterminds. No, that requires Draco to be an idiot, which doesn’t fit, and this story has enough secret masterminds already.
Crabbe and Goyle are Mr. Vandemar and Mr. Croup from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (the brute enforcer who rumbles and the clever enforcer who speaks formally; what TV tropes would call Those Two Bad Guys). Still no. I can’t remember it being done in the Harry Potter fanfiction that I remember reading, but it’s still a cliche, and it doesn’t really fit the surrounding story…
And that was the point at which my trope-subverter module blurted out, “Crabbe and Goyle are eleven-year-olds who’ve grown up watching plays with Those Two Bad Guys in them, and that’s who they think they ought to be”. Which I’d never seen done in Harry Potter fanfiction, which I’d never seen done anywhere, and it fit and it was awesome; so there the search stopped.
The initial step in this art is learning how to reject the first idea that pops into your head—-the part where you immediately think that Crabbe and Goyle are idiots, or you immediately think that the witch is going to be torn between dating the werewolf and the vampire, or where you automatically assume that since you’re writing Oz fanfiction the Wizard of Oz must necessarily be a fraud from Kansas. Even if your first idea hasn’t been done before, it is often wiser to reject the first idea that pops into your head (unless the first idea that pops into your head is truly awesome). The first thing that comes to mind is often the pattern-completing answer, the obvious answer, the unsurprising answer. Sometimes there is no way to be emotionally true to your story but to go with the obvious answer, but more often it is just your brain being lazy. A closely related skill to Don’t Do Stuff That’s Already Been Done is Don’t Take The Easy Way Out.
I wish I had better advice for how to be creative, and not merely original. I can direct you to the Original Seeing subsequence on LessWrong.com, but that won’t give you everything, nor will the standard writing books. In one sense, originality is easy; if you make Professor McGonagall be (rolls dice) a succubus who escaped from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld who is constantly obsessed with pouring water over things, then that exact character has probably never been done before, no. But this is mere chaos; it doesn’t mean anything, it’s not internally coherent. Originality is simple, but to be creative you have to do something that is both new and good, and this is harder. Even so, one part of the process is easy to describe: it’s the part where you keep looking so long as you don’t have anything new, or anything that feels like it clicks into place with the rest of the story (it doesn’t have to be amazing, especially on your first adventures as a writer, but it does need to feel like something you can use).
I conclude with the following piece of advice that is specific to fanfiction writers:
If you’re writing Naruto fanfiction, then either skip the Wave arc entirely, or do something TRULY AMAZING with Zabuza and Haku and every step of the journey along the way, because if I have to read ONE MORE fight against the Demon Brothers, I don’t care if your version of Naruto kills them with NUCLEAR WEAPONS, I am going to sigh at you.
If something has been done a dozen times before, there’s no point in showing it to the reader yet again. In fanfiction this is an even more urgent problem. If a canon event has to happen for plot reasons, but it isn’t being done really amazingly differently, then show only the part that is amazing. Better yet, just have the viewpoint character remember the whole thing afterward for two paragraphs. Don’t write it out in a whole chapter.
Consider Harry’s trip to Diagon Alley as shown in HPMOR. We don’t see everything that happens between when Harry trips over his pile of Galleons and when Harry ends up buying his mokeskin pouch. We don’t see Harry riding the rail-car into or out of Gringotts. None of that would be new to Harry Potter fandom, so it simply isn’t shown. It isn’t even summarized; it falls into the gap between chapters and disappears.
As a general principle of writing, you can get away with leaving out the boring parts to a far greater degree than you might imagine. There is a very important anecdote about an author who thought that he would write all the most exciting and interesting parts of their story first, and go back and put in the boring middle parts afterward. When they were done writing only the exciting parts, they looked over their work, came to an important realization, and sent the completed draft off to their editor.
Literally everything that we see happening inside HPMOR’s text happens differently from canon and fanon, because otherwise there wouldn’t be information to convey. And it happens interestingly differently, because otherwise why bother?
Your readers have already read, not just the canon Triwizard Tournament, but dozens of other fanfictions containing a Triwizard Tournament. If you’re going to put plot tension into that, you’d better have changed the initial conditions, and the stakes and possible outcomes, enough that it doesn’t feel like the same scene being read for the thirty-sixth time. And it can’t just be different, it has to be interestingly different.
In Naruto fandom there have been literally thousands of renditions of the Chuunin Exams. The greatest of all Naruto fanfictions, Time Braid, is about a Groundhog Day Loop centered on repeating the Chuunin Exams. And by the end of Time Braid, the initial conditions and the stakes and the possible outcomes have moved so far beyond canon and fanon that the story’s outcome resembles nothing I’ve seen anywhere else in Naruto fanfiction; and the universe left in the wake of the story isn’t any ‘outcome of the chuunin exams’ that you would recognize from any previous story.
Personalities and character arcs, challenges and stakes, confrontations and plot events, pairings and relationships; in fanfiction you don’t have to make literally all of it different, but you cannot have too much of it being the same.
(But do clearly signal to the reader if your story is allowed to change background historical facts, or the laws of magic. Don’t have the laws of magic looking the same as canon, and then resolve the climactic battle by having one of the magical laws being different. Because that would suck.)