…and then find that an established writer has written a story with roughly the same plot?
This just happened to me. In 1998, I wrote a story for a comic book fanzine called Fanzing - The Case of the Reborn Ripper. Just last week, my wife took out of the library Mary Higgins Clark’s “The Street Where You Live.” I found the premise to be eerily similar.
And yes, the recent spate of Jack the Ripper threads is what inspired me to post a message referring to that story of mine.
Sure. My “Saving Hitler” was rejected by Stan Schmidt at Analog because he had just bought a story “The Plot to Save Hitler.” I also had a Jack the Ripper story (“Beyond Madness”) that was evidently similar to one Michael Swanwick wrote a few years earlier.
I once was trying to work on a story idea and later discovered it was from a story I had read and completely forgotten.
So far, no.
I have a story in my head about vampires. I can’t give too much detail, though, 'cause I’m afraid someone will steal it. So it’s a big secret for now… 
I also wrote some fables with animal characters. They’re really written for grownups, as there just aren’t enough serious novels for adults with animals as main characters in the world. Just trying to fill the void. However, they’re generally received as children’s books and J.K. Rowling pretty much has the new-children’s-writer market kind of locked up. Once she shoots her creative wad, maybe some of the rest of us will get a shot, ya know?
I think I’ve managed to avoid the phenomenon simply because I’m not writing enough or very often. No discipline at all…
Happens all the time in writing seminars. There are only so many good ideas out there…especially ones that are timely or intriguing.
I proposed a wonderful idea for a role-playing game that turned out to be the plot of a movie that I had never seen (it had been described to me). That was pretty embarassing when it was pointed out.
(For those who care, it was about an archer who was getting ‘advice’ from a wizard through some supernatural means. Can’t remember much about it anymore, as it happened two decades ago.)
On three seperate occasions, ideas I’ve introduced (or been planning to introduce) into my role-playing games have shown up in sourcebooks.
Never exactly the same, but I’ve often discovered enough elements in common with something that was written (or was later written) that I was discouraged from finishing it, thinking that readers would say ‘Well, he lifted a lot of ideas from Snow Crash.’ Most recent is this one here I wrote a couple of years ago. This one had (or was going to have, it wasn’t finished yet) elements in common with both Snow Crash and The Matrix. Snow Crash came first, but I didn’t read it until after I had written what I have there, and I was going to go in the same direction with an ancient code that could infect people’s minds. This was tied in to the fact that the universe was a simulation, which is certainly not an idea unique to The Matrix and I was aware that there were plenty of stories that had that same idea before, I was cool with re-using it - just not after an extremely popular big-budget movie came out using it.
I had a D&D campaign set in a fantasy world experiencing an industrial revolution, then the PC game Arcanum came out which had the same basic idea - and then when I started playing the game I kept running into more and more that was like my campaign.
I was working on a story about a scientist who, during an experiment gone wrong, uploads her conciousness into a computer as her body dies. A month or so after I started, an X-Files episode based around the “uploaded brain” premise aired and I gave the whole thing up.
I write as ‘Tat’ and have done about 6 works in Shadowrun fiction.
You can see them at this
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/1076/
supposedly people like them.
Dammit hit button accidently.
Anyway, my first story was a great story about the influence of Asian business into America and how it was slowly making a chess game of our life.
Then I read Rising Sun. It was too close to my way of thinking. I junked it. Pissed me off
Hey, Tat! Ya meet Shadowrun writers in the darndest places, eh?
As for mine, it’s not quite the same–in fact it turned out to be not an issue but I was worried that it was. I’m writing a Shadowrun novel series for my website–currently three out of the six planned volumes are posted and I’m working on #s 4 and 5. I was very concerned after I’d formulated the plots that one of the established (that is to say, published) SR writers was planning to do something with one of his characters that was very similar to what I was planning. I agonized over this until I finally just asked the guy. He assured me that we weren’t on the same track, and I feel much better now.
Close enough! For several months I had been making notes, mental and otherwise, about a short story I planned to write based on the following line from CCR’s great song:*Green River *: “Barefoot girls dancin’ in the moonlight.” Then, I was looking through Stephen King’s book, On Writing, and he mentions in there that the song’s line would be great to base a short story on.
So now either: A)There’s 5,000 “Barefoot girls” short stories out there, or B) Anyone who reads my story would naturally assume that I got the idea from King. Real pisser! Lost my entheusiam for the project entirely.
Not actually a STORY, but in 1981-82 I started creating characters for a comic book I called “The Warriors of World War III”.
Basically the members were myself, and other guys from my old neighborhood forming an elite military unit fighting against computer controlled war machines using laser rifles and other sci-fi gadgetry.
I drew full color action poses of the main characters and showed them to my best friend Marv who was REALLY into comic books to get his approval and input.
Marv’s first question was:
“Where are their uniforms?”
My response was:
“They don’t wear “uniforms”, just so long as some part of their outfit is camoflage they’re OK.”
Marv gave me a whithering look as if to say:
That has got to be the STUPIDEST thing I’ve ever heard.
Since in my mind Marv was THE authority on comic books, I dropped the subject matter, and concentrated on my line of super-hero comics.
In 1983 Marvel Productions presented their animated TV miniseries G.I. Joe, which eventually became a daily series.
Featuring characters that:
Formed an elite military unit…
Did not wear uniforms…
Fought with laser rifles, and other sci-fi gadgetry…
:mad:
Not yet, but I have a mild paranoia that I will. Which is why I asked if anyone had been saved from the end of the world in a bathtub…
I was trying to come up with an idea for some way to introduce a new element of combat into a mech warrior-type role playing game. Has anyone done this one yet?- In addition to the standard land war elements of infantry, armor and air, how about subterrainian forces? My idea was to have forces based on a “phasing” technology that would allow them to pass through matter, making underground equivalent to undersea operations. The technology would have both advantages and limitations so subterr forces would not be invincible, but would add a new element of combat to the game.
There is a RTS game with combat both above and below the ground, but I don’t think the mechs phase through the ground, I think they use tunnels or something.
Several years ago, I finished one of the longest short stories I’ve ever written. It was a fantasy about a being that could manipulate the emotions of others through song.
About five months after I finished that story, I read Songmaster by Orson Scott Card, and instantly realized that my short story would likely never get published. 
Well, Lumpy, it looks like you don’t have to worry. Except for that reviewer, and maybe a couple others, nobody played, or possibly even heard of, Metal Fatigue. (Well, except me. For 5 minutes. God that game sucked.)
Anyway, getting back to the OP, it never happened to me, though it did happen to my ex-roommate. I forget what his idea was, exactly, but it matched that of one of my creative writing prof’s enough that he junked it. My prof’s story involved a bunch of scientists trying to clone Jesus (using cells found on the Shroud of Turin, if you’re curious), in an attempt to reproduce the effect of resurrection.
And I’m not exactly sure where the story was supposed to go from there since it was still a work in progress at the time he told our class about it. Needless to say, my roommate, whose idea, which presumably involved Jesus in some respect, was pissed.