I was writing a short story several months ago, hit a writers block and gave up - but kept it in case I ever finished it, since I thought it was one of my better tries and had some interesting ideas in it.
Recently I read Snow Crash for the first time. I loved the book, but it also made me sick at my stomach as I got further and further into it, and saw more and more elements it had in common with my story, written over 7 years later. Not just minor details, serious correlation. It does have major differences but if I read it now for the first time I would say the author was definitely ripping off Snow Crash.
I’ll never finish it now. This happened to me before, I wrote a story when I was a kid about a reptillian alien race that takes over the Earth and finds humans a delicacy, and then that miniseries V came out on TV a couple of months later. Has to be the most frustrating thing in the world.
I wrote a WWII screenplay set at an 8th Air Force Bomber base, centering around “War Brides,” European women who married American GIs and immigrated to the United States.
A few weeks after I finished the script, just for the hell of it, and to make sure I hadn’t used any elements directly used in other films, I watched, among others, “12 O’Clock High.” Somehow I had never gotten around to seeing this Gregory Peck classic.
An though, that film’s plot, and my screenplay bore no resemblance, other than time and place, etc., I discovered that I had duplicated two character’s names. One first name and one last name. I kept my character’s last name, as the character in the film was a minor one. But the character who bore the same first name as my character was the co-star (Dean Jagger as “Harvey”), so I changed mine, just in case.
it happened to my SO. He was shopping a book around at the same time a friend was. Both of them kept getting knocked back as the publishers felt that the books were too close in theme.
Both books eventually got published and I can’t for the life of me see much correlation between them ::shrug:: The publishers certainly could though.
I was once working on a short story about people uploading their conciousnesses into computers (Stop laughing! It was good! :)), and then X-Files aired Kill Switch when I was about halfway through. I gave up on it right away, because the similarities were pretty obvious even though I hadn’t heard anything about the episode until it aired.
I had gotten as far as writing an outline and naming a few characters in a story about people who remain on the earth after the Rapture and how they deal with the aftermath. The main character was an airline pilot who tries to escape to Africa…
Then Left Behind came out. The main character is an airline pilot who tries to escape to Africa.
Of course, my book was going to be 100% pure fiction, as my eschatological ideas do not bear any resemblance to Tim LaHaye’s. But that’s another thread…
Happens to me all the time. For the last five years, I’ve been outlining and writing a novel that I recently shelved because of a striking plot similarity to my favourite author’s next novel. I knew I was copping her style for the novel, but I didn’t want to be accused of completely ripping her off with the plot as well.
The novel’s not out yet, but my project is still on hold until at least her’s is out, simply because I’m paranoid.
I also feel more confident about the “second novel” that I’m writing now, anyway.
A year or so ago, my friend and I developed a great idea for a sci-fi film and started to work on it. Then, we were in Blockbuster and found a direct-to-video flick with essentially the same “great” idea. That got 86’d realsoonnow.
I once had the beginnings of a great short story about a guy who showed up to funerals, pretending to be a mourner, and met a girl who did the same thing. A similar premise was done much better in the movie Fight Club. And, someone has told me, there has been another movie with an even closer resemblance to my story, though I don’t remember what the name was.
The killer, though, is that I turned in my first complete short story to a workshop and got nothing but raves. It was compared to Nietzche, O’Conner, Dostoyevski. A couple months later, Pulp Fiction came out. Since then, the same story has generally been put down as Tarrentino-esque. I didn’t just lose a good plot. My subject matter and style of dialogue has become stigmatized. I like Tarrentino’s work, but I’ve been watching the slump in his career with not a little impish glee.
My friend came up with a premise that was almost exactly the same, as it turns out, as a story one of his professor’s (fiction writing prof) had been working on for a while. It was kind of funny when he told me his idea, because I was like, “Um, you know, Matt…”
I was 2/3rds of my way through my novel about redheads, tequila, and Camels when “Still Life with Woodpecker” came out. I was ½ way through my story about a hurricane in the Keys when Carl Hiaasen published “Heavy Weather.”
Their efforts turned out so much better than the stuff I was working on in a parallel line that I’ve not started a new novel for nine years now. I’m currently working on a musical, a short comedy film, and some poetry to take to the national slam competition in August in Seattle.(You’re invited.) Or rather, I would be working on these things if I weren’t spending 23/7 on this damn addictive Board.
Has the Surgeon General been advised of the existence of the SDMB?
A couple of times I’ve had stories rejected because they were too similar to other stories I’d never read (one was unpublished and has pretty much the same title and idea as mine).
I once was working to formulate a story on this great idea I thought I had. Then when I was reading for the Nebulas, I realized I had inadvertently cribbed the idea from one of the nominees.
A few years ago I started work on a man who finds himself trapped inside the storyline of one of his favorite novels, unable to deviate from the plot. I didn’t finish it.
I understand that my idea occurred to someone else and became the concept behind In the Mouth of Madness.
As you can see from these posts above, it can and does happen. The question is, what do you do about it?
If they are so completely similar that they seem like a rip off, then scrap it. But similar ideas can go in different directions. Take the Steven King/Richard Bachman novels from a few years ago.
No writer ever works in a vacuum. You read. You are influenced by that reading. Others can be influenced by that reading too, often in very similar ways.
But the main point is that if every writer stopped and asked him or herself if what they’re about to write has ever been written about before, if they stopped and tried to research all the stories and novels and novellas and tv series and movies to be absolutely sure, no one would get any writing done. There will ALWAYS be that person who says you ripped your writing directly off a story you’d never even read from a 1930s magazine. There will ALWAYS be storylines that go in the same direction because writers sometimes think in the same way and are sometimes influenced by the same things.
But if you believe your story is original, if you know that you didn’t copy it from anywhere, your story IS original. If you feel uncomfortable about it, you can scrap it. If you want to let the editors decide for you, let them. But you cannot worry about what others have written. You’ll never finish anything.
Me, too, but on a less grand scale. I write a weekly humour column and it’s not uncommon to make a joke or find humour in a situation, only to find someone else (a TV personality, or worse, another humour columnist) has made the same joke.
A friend once told me about the plot of a science-fiction novel he’d been writing on and off for years. It was about some teenagers who were on the run from alien robots. The aliens had invaded the Earth and enslaved the human race. They maintained their power by putting a mind-control chip in every human’s brain at puberty.
“Ah,” I said, “That sounds like the ‘Tripod’ books.”
My friend was devastated. He couldn’t remember ever having read John Christopher’s “When the Tripods Came” series, but the concepts were identical. He eventually decided that maybe he had read the “Tripod” books as a kid and forgotten about them.
The things that make a story good, for me anyway, are almost always not the major plot points but the way in which individual people are depicted, and interact with each other. In many ways the plot is just a rough framework that you hang the REAL story over, which is how human beings are.
Regardless of the fact that two plots may be similar, if you’ve done a good job bringing the characters to life, and making them intersting, and making them SAY SOMETHING about the human condition, I wouldn’t worry too much about plot similarities. So don’t give up on your vision.
On the other hand, if the plot is driving the story, and you don’t have much else to go on, you should probably ask yourself why you’re bothering anyhow. A couple interesting ideas about future technology or alien languages or how to commit the perfect crime are not enough to make a story (as a whole) worth reading.
Just IMHO, of course. There’s a market for that sort of thng too.
Also, writing that is focused on character can often be repurposed if need be. I’ve cannibalized pieces of things I was writing to drop characters into different places when I saw that they would create more interesting friction than they did in their original places. (They just seemed to want to meet!) Or if, in your case, plot details become to much like something else out there for your comfort.
About 7 basic plots theory (some say there are only two!)
Anyway, to answer the OP, this happens to me every once in a while. But like ren suggested, I focus much more on characterization and narrative, so if plots coincide, I just deal with it.
I started an interracial love story set during the Vietnam War (don’t laugh, it’s actually quite good!) and then read The English Patient by Michael Ondaajte. Wow! An interracial love story set during WWII!
Also, I became really hooked on the idea of switching narrative techniques after I read Madame Bovary, but I wanted to take it further. I started a story about this girl who travels with her parents to India as they are missionaries, and really concentrated on the different narratives, only to read The Poisenwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which details the story of four girls who travel to Africa with their parents, the father being a Baptist missionary.
But, as I said, my characters are so different that I hardly think it matters.
