How Creatives Can Be Original: Journey to the Center of the Earth!

I recently rewatched the classic adventure film Journey to the Center of the Earth (Fox, 1959), starring James Mason and Pat Boone. I encourage every creative to watch this film for its many excellent cinematic and story values: Exciting plot, heroic characters, stunning visuals, big life-supporting theme, and evocative music, among others. But I want to focus on the key aspect of the film that I think best explains why it is adventure storytelling and filmmaking at its highest level. Its originality.

As a general point for all creatives, if you want to write a popular film or novel, one key way to help you reach that success is to be original. Easily said. Often believed to be achieved. Rarely done.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is a brilliant adaptation of the classic novel of the same name by one of literature’s most ingenious and popular writers, Jules Verne. Frenchman Verne was a prodigious writer of original stories in the second half of the nineteenth century, mostly in the adventure and science fiction genres. Let’s look briefly at the premises of four of Verne’s greatest stories and see a key idea that unifies them:

Around the World in Eighty Days, about the first people to travel around the globe in a balloon.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, about the first man to conquer living under the seas in a submarine.

From the Earth to the Moon, about human’s first flight into space to land on the moon.

Journey to the Center of the Earth, about the first humans to reach the core of the earth.

As you have no doubt noticed, in each of these four stories Jules Verne created his own niche of how to be original. He created inventive hero tales of humans (often using some new technology) struggling against great odds to do something that no other human had ever achieved. Thus Jules Verne created fascinating, exciting and inherently original stories.

What is the big takeaway here for writers, publishers, producers, and directors?

The great power of originality in a story to attract, seduce and move an audience.

How are you going to be original in your story? What can you learn from Jules Verne’s large creative footsteps? Do you have an originality niche?

Or are you going to dish up the same old cliches, boring concepts, shallow themes, and empty characters that infest our screens and novels?

You can create a much better story if you find your own way to be original and inventive in your story premise and its characters. For example, what new story niche can you find and dramatize? Some exciting new world, science, or discovery, for example, as Verne did? At the very least, you must find and add to your story some element that is new, unique, different.

Cliches are a brick wall for any creative. But originality can be a door opener, not only to the awesome world of imagination but also to that of thrilling artistic success. To be original takes artistic courage, great mental effort, and an unassailable belief in a personal vision. Let the masterfully inventive Jules Verne excite and inspire you to find your niche of storytelling originality. There are still many ways to be imaginative! If needed, let me help you.

Here is the trailer for the classic Journey to the Center of the Earth. (Beware of spoilers.)

• Linkedin 

• Twitter 

Stories are ideas in action!

Please add this newsletter email address [email protected] to your address book.

© 2022 COPYRIGHT SCOTT MCCONNELL ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDH