I Know It's Been Done

I am endlessly fascinated with the mentally unstable. I am obsessed with what goes on in people's tortured minds.  What interests me most are the people who hide it - the people who can go by, pass for normal, but be completely torn apart by their own mind's thoughts.

I want to write a story with the following scene: The main character (we'll call him Dan) is sitting in a coffeehouse, holding a cup of tea, staring off into nothing. He says nothing, but his mind wanders to dark realms. He looks at the glass window, wonders how thick it was, how much force it would take to crack it, if he could punch it hard enough to shatter it, if it was shatterproof glass, what would happen if his fist went through, but only punched a hole through the glass, thus making it impossible to get his arm out without getting his wrist slashed by the glass surrounding his arm, if he would lose enough blood that he would die from it, who would come to his funeral, how long it would take for the people he knew to find out he had died if they didn't live nearby, and how sad they would be if they only found it out long enough after the fact and so many hundred miles away from him. Dan's train of thought gets interrupted by a friend who runs into him. The friend is enthused at the chance meeting and asks Dan how he's doing. Dan looks up, thinks for a second, and says, "Same as usual."

The thing is, I know this kind of scene is not new. Heck, I remember a variation of this being done on an episode of South Park. But that really doesn't matter to me. I know it's been done, but I still want to do it. I want to write this scene. I want my characters to experience these scenarios.  I want to have them deal with these problems and see how they do handle them.

It doesn't matter if a particular scene or any other part of a story has been done before. What matters is how it's done. If you can make a good world, make compelling characters, create scenes that move people mentally or emotionally, then you are doing good writing. I can say for certain that if something has been done a million times before, but yours is a great version of it, nobody will care how many times it's been done.