Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-9523715-20140706065611/@comment-24381191-20140706171553

LinebeckIV wrote: I just feel like whenever something becomes really successful people start to draw inspiration from it and then slowly or quite quickly a formula is developed. I don't think it has as much to do with the fact that there's no possibility of innovation just that people are too scared to break out of the established base for such stories. The next big creepypasta will have to be something different, to which others will imitate. Yeah, like the Jeff Formula, and if you go to creepypasta.com, Derpbutt says so many people have written Ben Drowned copies with their favorite video game. But sometimes, a person doesn't even know about the original and write basically the same thing. There was this one person, Dragonshifter, who said they were going to do a pasta in which the main character is a girl with telekinesis and is bullied; she has a mother who is a satanist and in the end the girl kills her bullies. This is almost the exact plot of Stephen King's Carrie, with the exception of the mother being a religious zealot instead of a devout satanist.

Yet, when I approached Dragon about this, they said they didn't even know about Carrie.

Sometimes people have a great idea, then they find out it's already been done.