There's no such thing as from scratch
Further to my comments on a post by
sara yesterday about the assumption that writers who deploy similar plots/tropes/configurations of characters are derivative of Some Other Writer or Work -
To be completely original one would have had to a) create language and b) develop the idea of telling a story all by one's lonesome. Short of doing what the Emperor Frederick II did and bring up children without any interaction with other human beings (they all died) to see what language they would speak, this is not really a feasible model.
When we talk of cooking something 'from scratch' we don't actually mean that e.g. we have developed agriculture or at the very least harvested seeds of wild wheats, milled the grain, mixed the flour with water, left the dough out for wild yeasts to start fermenting; or that we have hunted and slaughtered the animal, butchered it, etc etc. What we tend to mean is that we have started from the raw materials already in our cupboards, using the equipment in our kitchen, rather than obtaining readymade.
Even radical gastronomy on the Blumenthal/Feran model doesn't actually commence from a naive premise of let's throw all the ingredients up in the air and see what comes down - it proceeds from a knowledge of existing food science, develops &/or subverts this.
It really helps, rather than hinders, to have a knowledge of what has gone before - cf the recurrent criticism of litfic writers who venture into genre and reinvent the wheel, sometimes as an octagon.
I will also surmise that there are some narrative tropes that have become completely detached from the origin tale, and that there are people churning out Orphan Heroine/Brooding Male/Looming House romances who have never read either Jane Eyre or even Rebecca. If one of them thinks, wow, wouldn't it be cool if his Dark Secret was a mad wife in the attic, is that ripping off Bronte?
Oft, oft have I bemoaned the Failure To Engage With Existing Literature by historians. In this, as in so many fields, it is not actually about dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, it is a whole lot of people of more or less standard size making small but significant contributions or new developments as part of a chain, a collective and cumulative endeavour.
Unfortunately, of course, the narrative trope of Amazing Game-Changing Original Discovery persists, it's as hard to kill as the Angel in the House
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