I’ve heard just about every author say that it isn’t the ideas that make the author, it’s the ability to actually write (and finish) the damn article/book/short story/novel series/tv-spec script/whatever.
So, as I’m sure is true for most/all of you, there are about a bazilion plotlines and potential worlds and potential stories floating around inside me - most are unformed, amorphous blob-ideas, some have worldbuilding treatments, some have plot-ideas or associated character throughlines or even full outlines. Most (maybe all) are probably utter crap, at least until I can advance my craft enough to polish potential turds.
Here’s my question. Say that I have a vague idea, with some bits saved on my computer about worldbuilding and a really sketched-out plot, about um… let’s go with how dustbunnies arose and began a reign of horror on a household. Let’s further say that I wasn’t working on this idea at all, it was an older one, and one that was happily mouldering away in my computer while I worked on other things. Let’s then say that I was mindlessly surfing Hulu when I came across “The Dustbunnies!” described as a B-movie about how “genetically-impregnated dustbunnies in the home of a mad scientist come to life and terrorize the household.”
If you were me, do you watch the show? Do you avoid it?
What about if it were a book, or a comic book, or if it were about “soots” like from Totoro instead of “dustbunnies” or if it were hairballs or even further removed, about that gunk from inside your sink drain?
There are no new ideas. So what is your response to finding other people’s artistic expressions that venture into the territory that you wanted to explore yourself?
I eagerly consume such things, because if someone else writes it, I don’t have to. Plus I’m awful, so the world would be better off if my decent ideas were used by others.
I actually do seek out material that is similar to what I’m trying to write. I consider it a precaution against accidental plagiarism.
I was writing a story about Bigfoot, when “Naked Came the Sasquatch” came out. I was terrified, and read it immediately, to see if it meant I needed to change my story. Fortunately, that book was completely different than my story. (Sigh… Much better, just for one thing!)
I like to stay on top of what the “state of the art” is in my chosen sub-sub-genre, specifically to avoid stepping on someone else’s toes.
Also because it’s the genre I love most, so of course I’m gonna read a lot of it!
Of course you watch it. Everyone handles ideas differently. I’;d watch it because I’d be curious about how they approached it. Even if the basic story is the same, two different authors with emphasize different things, or tell it from the poin t of view of a different character, or something.
I had an experience similar to what you describe. Shortly after reading Ashley Montague’s book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, it occurred to me that it was superb material for a play. I’d heard the story of Joseph* Merrick before, but never in such detail, and it was filled with dramatic moments and interesting ironies.
And not long after that Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man opened Off-Broadway. I felt like I missed out on something great. But my play, if I’d written it, would have been very different (and probably not 1/100 as good), just as the screenplay for the David Lynch film The Elephant Man was different from the play.
*not John, as both Montague’s book and later biographies make clear. All the contemporary records give his name as “Joseph”. Amazing as it may seem, Dr. Frederick Treves, in his memoirs about his famous patient, misremembered the name.
An idea I had was to try to write an alternative history about World War 3. Most books that address future war scenarios envision a quick war, all the better to include it in a novel-length story. But predictions about how a war will go are almost always wrong and there’s no reason that a third world war couldn’t last years if it stayed conventional.
But then Ian Slater came out with his World war 3 series, which was sorta what I was looking for, although as with any narrative it focused on one brilliant general who just happened to be instrumental in every important engagement, so it lost some realism there.
Then finally came the outstanding The War that Never Was by Michael Palmer, which was written like a history book rather than a work of fiction. And so my idea was done as well as it probably can be done.
Interesting that everyone is pretty much in the “of course you look at the thing” camp.
I tend to agree, because it’s my genre(s) and if it’s an idea that I was interested, it’s - well, it’s an idea that I’m interested in, you know?
So my follow-up questions are:
Do you ever worry that if you do eventually get back to your idea, that it will be worse or different or tainted or indebted to the other related works that you’ve seen? (I’m not expressing this idea well, but it’s related to how some people have trouble seeing “their” Gandalf or Aragorn after seeing movies - they now only see McKellen’s and Mortensen’s portrayals, or the animated figures from the Bakshi version.)
Do you worry at all about the potential that what you encounter will be very close to what you were planning to do originally, and that if you do create your version, someone will think you “stole” the other idea/character/plotline/worldbuilding concept? (And in my case, like several others commented, didn’t even create something of quality, as icing on the crappy hypothetical cake.)
The only reason I create is because people haven’t made exactly the things I want to watch/read/see yet. Generally if I come across a plot that at first glace sounds like what I’m doing, upon reading it or watching it, there are enough points different that there’d be no issue if I continued (though like RealityChuck says, are generally better than what I had in mind).
Honestly I read and read not only because I enjoy it, but so that I can expand my horizons in terms of plots, ideas, and so on. An author I read said, don’t stick to reading books only in the genre you’re interested in doing, read from all the genres. Then your own plots and ideas will be that much more nuanced when you write your own story.
And all stories are indebted to others. Nothing original anymore, as the trope goes. The hero and damsel and sidekick have been around since the dawn of oral history. The idea is to put enough of yourself and your own spin on all these little pieces from other works, build enough on top and around, that it’s yours now. Reading other works keeps you from being too bland to the point that your story is too indistinguishable from the rest.
However when it comes to design I definitely get tainted by roughs people send over. I might have gone in a totally different direction but now I think the customer likes this color and this font (even if it was just them slapping something together and they have no real preference)…and so I try to work them in. The difference is, that’s something where I create specifically to make other people happy. That’s the job, giving them what they want. When I make my own stories and art it’s for me, so I don’t feel trapped or tainted by other works, I feel free to do exactly what I want.
ETA: I have a desire to make things “mine” so even if I feel inspired by other characters or works I feel the need to build my own in such a way that they’re mine. So by the nature of it I have to do something different enough that I can feel that I possess this character and they’re not just a ripoff from someone else. I’d be too dissatisfied otherwise.
Yes. I read a hell of a lot, and so I sometimes forget details, and I live in dread that some detail will pop up in my own writing, which I have forgotten having read in someone else’s.
But on the usual order of things, I consciously create differences, to protect myself against accidental similarity.
Yep. Scares the hell out of me. But, again, this is much of why I make the effort of introducing changes from what is out and about.
(I had the idea of characters moving around “inside” a Shakespeare play before I ever heard of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.” In this case, I saw the movie version decades after I’d written my story. I was enormously relieved that the differences are significant. Saved both by mere luck, and by the breadth of the possibilities in the concept.)
On my first sale of a fiction piece, the editor of the magazine I sold it to said to me later that he “wasn’t even going to read it because the idea had been done to death.” Fortunately (for me) his secretary talked him into reading it, and I made my first sale.
I had probably read some of those other stories, but my story was unique enough to work, so…
Currently, I write a humor column that is circulated among a number of newspapers. Do I read other humor columnists’ columns to see what they are doing or how they are doing it? Absolutely. Sometimes I even use their ideas for jumping off places. However, I think I keep it uniquely me.
I do cover myself, somewhat, by telling my proofreader(s) and editor(s) where my ideas or stories might have come from so they can make sure I don’t step over the line. I occasionally will send a note to fellow writers and ask them if this is too similar to one of theirs. Only once has one of them said it was similar, but he was kind enough to say mine was better and deserved to be published.
Once, I do remember a rival publisher attempting to raise a stink about a column being too similar to one of his people’s columns. My publisher wrote a note to the rival pointing out that 1. I had written mine long before his person had, and 2. If I had indeed copied it, there would not have been half the spelling errors I am prone to make.
He ran both letters on the op ed page and I am pretty sure my readership increased.
It’s not that different than actors playing a part and not wanting to watch the movie or filmed stage production with a famous actor playing the same part. It may affect their performance–either outwardly or inwardly.
See, that’s the thing tho. I’m not working on it right now. I mean, yeah, it’s back there, and I think about it every once in a while, but I can only work on two or three ideas at a time, and right now I’m on a different set of three that are going well. (Surely I’m not the only one who gets rabid brain-eating plotbunnies that have to be wrangled into the personal slushpit before getting back to the current works?)
I thought of making a note of the similar creation and putting it aside to experience when/if I get around to that idea, but then I’m looking at something right when I need my own style and creativity to show out. If I wait until afterwards, then I potentially miss that something is done to death or cliche, or that there are established tropes that people might expect to see.
If I encounter it now, when it will be months, or more likely years before I get to that particular idea, like Trinopus said, I worry that I might add something to my mental framework and forget that I watched/read it somewhere specific.
Former editor’s assistant & editor (and always aspiring author) here.
A critical part of an editor’s job is knowing what’s out there in-the-works. Part of that is done by having experience in the industry and part of that is done by accessing databases that keep track of such things to a limited degree. You, as a writer, aren’t expected to have that encyclopedic knowledge of all the works that might compete with yours. And a critical part of the editor’s assistant’s job is weeding through the slush pile and the pile of submissions from known authors and finding infrequent gems and convincing his/her boss to take a look.
But there’s a catch-22 involved:
Editors won’t accept submissions without samples for the piles. Until a submission gets past the pile (and the assistant and the editor’s bad mood for whatever reason) that editor isn’t going to contact the writer and say, “I like it. Send the rest. Here’s the contract…” and until that happens, the basic data (working title, author, essence/summary/description) won’t get entered into the database.
My creative writing instructor used to say, “There are thirteen plot lines. Half of them have standard twists. It’s all been done before. But it’s not the plot that sells the manuscript. It’s the tale. It’s the details. It’s the part of you that gets put into the strings of words and somehow appeals to discerning editors who have their jobs because they know their audiences. Let it flow, and let it be you.”
Lastly: An issue of Writer magazine advised, “Write is as much detail as you can fit. Your readers will identify with facets of the character(s) and compare/contrast their own actions/reactions/etc. with what you’ve written. That’s how they embed themselves into your tale.”
Ebert’s Law: It’s not what it’s about, but how it’s about it.
Though I’m also skeptical of “only X plots”; the smaller X is, the more useless those plots are as analytical tools and the more dissimilar two stories can be while ostensibly having the same plot.
As a published author, I must agree with comments above suggesting that you should be reading as much as possible in your genre and sub-genera. Publishers expect you to know what is around in your area, competing titles and so on. It is usually expected in a proposal that you will show this and explain why yours is different or adds to the current state pf the field.
I am skeptical of the ‘nothing new’ concept, too. But similar themes are not a problem. Readers often look for similar themes to something they’ve liked, and publishers know that.
I read everything I can that is a similar genre to mine. And the need to actually finish a manuscript and then work it to death in editing is the reality of professional writing.
There’s only two plots: Stories with plot. Stories without plot.
There’s only two plots: Stories where he gets the girl. Stories where he doesn’t get the girl.
Etc.
I agree. The breakout is arbitrary. Something like the Dewey Decimal System probably makes more sense, where you break things out more finely in a set of subsequent layers, rather than trying to split everything up into X top groups.