Author reusing own material

Cafe Society
1

I just encountered something that surprised me a bit, and I wondered if others might let me know how common this is, and what they consider the appropriateness of it.

I read quite a bit, fiction and non. One of my favorite authors is Richard Russo (Nobody’s Fool). At the library the other day, I happened upon 2 of his books that I had somehow or another missed reading previously: a 2003 short story collection The Whore’s Child, and a 1997 novel Straight Man.

I read the story collection first. It included one story called The Farther You Go in which the protagonist was a middle aged man who had recently undergone surgery for prostate cancer. His daughter and SIL were building a house 1/2 mile from his house, using the same blueprints, and were experiencing money problems. The main action involves the dad going over to their house after an argument in which the SIL hits the daughter. In the front of the book it notes that this story was originally published in Shanendoah - presumably a magazine. I do not know the date of publication in the magazine.

So now I’m reading the novel. Curiously, it notes that the prologue was originally published as a short story in the New Yorker, and I remembered reading it there. The protagonist is a professor at a small college. One night he is out for a run. After running one mile, he decides to go an extra 1/2 mile in the direction where his daughter and SIL are building a house. I think the first thing that got me was the names of the young people. I checked the other book and, yes, they were the same names. As he runs, he muses that the home they are building used the same blueprints as his house. And they are experiencing money problems. Some of the lines, such as the SIL leaving one job for another, are pretty much identical. While at the house, the dad takes a leak, and thinks he is developing kidney stones.

So here I am, maybe a quarter of the way into this book, and I already anticipate that the dad has prostate cancer, and that at the end there will be this scene following a fight between the kids. And it is kinda disappointing, feeling like I already know at least part of what will happen before I get there. Much of what I enjoy about a good novel is not knowing exactly where it is going.

Moreover, I find myself having feelings of deja vu concerning other plot points in the book, wondering if I have read about them somewhere else. I think in this respect I am actually conflating any number of other books I have read over the years, rather than solely Russo’s works.

How often is this kind of “borrowing” from oneself among authors? Ought the 2003 short story collection also note that characters from and parts of that particular story were previously presented in a 1997 novel?

I find my opinion of this author lessening somewhat. Discovering this makes him seem somewhat less creative. Am I being too harsh on him?

2

It’s done from time to time and hardly a crime. Sometimes an author will even take a stand-alone excerpt of a novel he’s working on and send it off as a short story.

In science fiction, many major works were originally published as short stories (e.g., The Foundation Trilogy) because up until the 60s, it made more financial sense. But the practice still continues in literary fiction, where an author sells short stories to get a reputation. In addition, sometimes an author likes a particular short story and decides to expand on it to create a novel.

As for Russo, when exactly was the short story first published? I’m betting it was around the time he was working on the novel.

3

It’s very common to publish a short story expanded intyo a novel, or a series of short stories put together to form a longer work (A.E. van Vogt called this a “fix-up”, a term the Science Fiction Encyclopedia continues to use, as it’s such a common thing.)

It’s also very common for a writer to completely forget that he used a setting or situation and to use it again in another book. L. Sprague de Camp did this, and even confessed to doing it in his Science Fiction Writer’s Handbook. It’s probably a lot more common than people think.

Finally, there are plenty of cases of writers rewriting a book that they did earlier. Arthur C. Clark did it with The City and the Stars and Against the Fall of Night. Robert Sheckley did it in The Humours and Crompton Divided. John Fowles rewrote The Magus when he got older.

4

Arthur C. Clarke freely admitted that he used his short story “The Sentinel” as the jumping off point for 2001. But other than the fact that they both featured humans finding an alien device on the Moon only to have it “signal” its presumed makers there is little resemblance.

I’ll also point out that Don DeLillo republished the opening chapter of Underworld as a standalone novella Pakfo at the Wall. But it was an awesome chapter… :slight_smile: Actually, I did not know this before…according to Wikipedia, the work initially appeared as a folio in Harper’s Magazine five years before Underworld was published…so that’s three different incarnations of the same work.

5

Western writer J T Edson recycled several of his short stories as novels later in his writing career (unfortunately not always with optimum results).

6

Yeah - when I read that book I recalled reading that chapter before, I thought in the New Yorker or the Atlantic.

The frontispiece to the story collection does not indicate when they were originally published.

7

Douglas Adams’ novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is essentially a re-work of a series of Doctor Who episodes he wrote for the BBC way back when …

(I was really ticked when I first read that book, because I recognized the plot but didn’t realize that Adams had written those episodes, or know that he’d been a writer for that show at all, in fact. I almost wrote him an irate letter. :smack: )

8

Theodore Sturgeon did a “fix-up” of three novellas, turning them into More Than Human.

9

Stephen Fry’s first novel, The Liar, is semi-autobiographical, and he wrote about some of the same events in his actual autobiography, Moab is my Washpot, a few years later.

10

Gregory Benford’s Foundation’s Fear totally pissed me off with this. He’d written two long stories for a couple of shared-world anthology books (Timegate and Timegate II). The idea of those books, created by Robert Silverberg, was what would happen if you made sentient computer simulations of historical characters. Benford’s stories told of a philosophical debate between Voltaire and Joan of Arc. The first story was called, I think, The Rose and the Scalpel. Don’t recall the second title.

Somehow, he shoehorned this story into his volume of the New Foundation series. If you aren’t familiar with the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, they take place something more than 20,000 years in our future. Earth is uninhabitable, but humanity has spread throughout the galaxy, living on virtually every planet where living is possible. The race has totally forgotten what planet first spawned it (this is a major plot point, and has no wiggle room). Yet somehow, these characters from Earth’s history exist in the galactic computer network. Benford uses these unlikely characters and their unlikely plot (changed as little as possible from the original) for close to half the book.

He also had a subplot involving human minds being hooked into the sensorium of chimpanzees, which I hear was a different short story of Benford’s, called Immersion.

Though it isn’t in the theme of the thread, I also hated Benford for introducing laborer robots to the Foundation world, something else that contradicts a hugely important plot point of Asimov’s work.

I was once at a reception with a bunch of SF authors, including Benford. I had to stay on the other side of the room from him to keep myself from shouting at the man.

{edited for typo}

11

This just struck me as so amusing - the image I get of some stranger blindsiding an an author with complaints about his writing choices, and the author’s possible reactions to being accosted out of the blue. :stuck_out_tongue:

12

I read The Magus in an English Novels course. It was fascinating, but all of us were a bit at sea when the prof asked us about the deeper meanings. Symbolism & stuff. (Yes, I’d studied mythology. But I wasn’t sure how every element was supposed to fit together.)

When the rewritten edition appeared, I believe Fowles admitted he put some stuff in the book just for the heck of it. No deeper meanings!

(But I have enjoyed several of his books.)

13

Mike Lunnon Wood’s books have a lot of characters with the same names and there’s always a significant death. Since they were above-average, I’m somewhat disappointed that he’s stopped writing.

14

Cynthia Heimel pretty much cannibalized her book Sex Tips for Girls to write her play A Girl’s Guide to Chaos. Still a good play, though.

15

Hell, have you read any Dean Koontz? The man’s whole body of work is basically the same novel over and over and over again.

16

I just dropped in to say the same thing about Clive Cussler.

17

Isabel Allende:

  • Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna
  • Paula and My Invented Country
18

David Weber’s In Fury Born is his earlier novel Path of the Fury with a few hundred pages of prequel added.

19

Ha! Good call. I picked up one of his books recently - in the two minutes I looked at it, I found a typo and a quote from Star Wars. Star Wars, of all places. Don’t get me wrong, I love the movie, but when you’re using George Lucas’s dialogue, clearly something’s not all there in your writing skills.

20

Raymond Chandler cannibalized some of his early short stories and turned them into novels.