Yes, It’s All Been Done. So What?
When it feels like every story has already been told, tell yours anyway—because your voice still matters.
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We’ve all heard it.
“Everything’s been written already.”
And in some ways, that’s true. The hero’s journey? Done. Star-crossed lovers? Check. Betrayal, revenge, redemption, chosen ones, ragtag crews, apocalypses, cozy villages with dark secrets, yes, yes, and absolutely yes.
In fact, over 3 million books are published every single year. That’s not counting the millions of stories written but never shared: fanfiction, blog posts, serial web fiction, private notebooks, and hard drives full of drafts labeled final_final_v3.docx.
So, if it’s all been done before, what are we doing here?
We’re telling our versions.
Because what makes a story feel fresh isn’t that it’s never been done. It’s that you haven’t done it. Your voice. Your worldview. Your sense of humor. Your scars and obsessions. The way you twist the familiar.
It’s Not the Ingredients—It’s the Recipe
Think of storytelling like cooking. We all start with the same basic ingredients: love, fear, loss, desire, power, survival. But just like you can have a hundred versions of spaghetti, and some of them will make you cry with joy and others will taste like 3 week old tuna casserole, stories hit differently depending on who’s making them.
Take a look:
The Hunger Games wasn’t the first dystopian rebellion story, but Suzanne Collins mixed Roman gladiators with reality TV and adolescent trauma.Circe by Madeline Miller took a well-known Greek myth and told it from the perspective of the sidelined witch, with rich emotion and modern nuance.Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik reimagined Rumpelstiltskin through an Eastern European lens and a trio of female protagonists with deeply personal stakes.Knives Out gave us a classic whodunit, but filtered through sharp political commentary and a caretaker heroine we hadn’t seen before.Even Star Wars was famously described as “Flash Gordon meets Akira Kurosawa.”The familiar becomes new when it passes through you. (Made a rhyme there)
What Makes It Yours?
So how do you make something feel like your story, even if the bones are ancient?
Here are some ways to start:
Change the lens. Shift the point of view. Whose voice hasn’t been heard? What happens if the villain tells the tale?Blend genres. Try a spy thriller in a magical world. A romantic comedy inside a space station. A western with ghosts and golems.Twist expectations. Start with the trope—and break it halfway through. Or double down and push it to its limit.Write from the scar, not the wound. Use what you’ve lived through after you’ve gone through the healing, not while you’re in it. Filter it through fiction. The feelings will be real even if the world is not.Let your weird out. The strange details that only you would think to include? That’s your magic.The Truth Is…
The world doesn’t need you to reinvent the wheel.
It needs your version of the wheel, how it rolls, how it breaks, how it spins out in a hail of sparks while your character clings to the axle screaming.
It needs your voice in the mix.
So yes, it’s all been done. But not like this. Not with your fingerprints on it, or with your heart.
And that’s reason enough to start.
What’s your favorite example of a story done differently?
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