Writing about same thing as another author - unavoidable similarity

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I couldn’t figure out which forum to put this in - didn’t seem like Cafe, didn’t seem like General Questions or IMHO, so in MPSIMS it goes:
I’m writing a work of fiction. Part of it involves a detailed description of a particular reaction in physics, which is important to the story. But another fiction author has already written and published a detailed description of that same physics reaction in his story.

I’m trying to make my description sound as different than his as possible. Unfortunately, since we’re describing the same thing, there’s bound to be a great deal of similarity. Resemblance is unavoidable.

  1. How do I do this without someone accusing, “Hey, you’re copying him?” Atoms and molecules behave a certain way in physics. There’s just no way around it.

  2. Is there some legal principle that protects authors writing about the same thing from claims of plagiarism, as long as it sounds somewhat different? After all, two people writing about 9/11, or Chernobyl, or a NASCAR race, are bound to sound similar.

2

You’re in the clear on 2. Copyright protects things like characters, story, and setting, not explanations of scientific phenomena. You’re probably in the clear on 1 as well, unless your story is somewhat similar.

3

Substitute every 5th word in your story with “muk luk”

4

There are a lot of ways to describe even similar physics and engineering. Use different analogies. Lots of people have covered similar ground in different words. Especially if you’re considering the actual construction and implications, things can be very different. Compare Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise and Charles Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds, both about building a space elevator. Clarke even wrote a foreward to Sheffield’s book pointing out the similarities, some of them pretty amazing (right down to the situations and the names of vehicles).

Nevertheless, the books are vastly different. And their descriptions of physics and of engineering practices aren’t alike.

5

I often use cooking analogies to explain production processes, database structures or chemistry. The “thing” I’m explaining is the same, but just by picking, oh, pasta bolognese vs omelettes (both are things/processes where picking the right label lets you apply the same recipe to a large variety of dishes - in production process terms, the same worklist to a variety of products), the explanations sound very different and are better understood by different people. There are a lot more people familiar with spaghetti bolognese than with artichoke omelette.

6

I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re dealing with facts and there are only so many ways to express it.

I deal with the Turnitin plagiarism detection software, and I tell people that if a work gets an “originality score” of less than 15% (100% is directly plagiarized) that it’s nothing to bother with. Some things just are best expressed in certain ways.

No one is going to notice, so write it the way it sounds best to you. It’s not worth the effort to worry about it.

7

If you aren’t a very experienced writer, then save this description until toward the end of your writing, and do it on a day when you have already written several pages, and are “in your voice” as a writer. You can take something very straightforward, like how to parallel park a car, then try to imagine how Dorothy Parker would write out directions on how to do it, vs. how Ernest Hemingway would. What is important is that the description is in your own voice. If there seems to be an abrupt change when the “physics” scene starts, so that the reader is jolted, that’s when the reader is going to think “Hmmm. What’s going on here?” But if the transition is seamless, no one will question the fact that you call a joule a joule.

8

When my agent sold my first novel she said to read a couple of other authors–I had heard of both of them but not read them–because that was who I’d be compared to.

So I read one of them. And I realized that, if I’d read it before I wrote my book, I wouldn’t have written my book, it was that similar. At least five major plot points were exactly the same. The tone was similar. I even used one of the same jokes (made by a character). Oh, and the characters? I could pretty well match them up, protagonist-to-protagonist, villain-to-villain, even the minor characters.

Basically, it was horrifying. I could see how someone might think I had lifted THE ENTIRE BOOK and just changed it a little. Not at all helpful that she was an established author (and by the way, someone I’d be honored to be compared to) and I was this nobody.

Some years later I met this author and essentially told her all this. She laughed. She said some things were just “in the wind” and that pretty much the same thing had happened to her, and it just happens.

I’m also remembering a year when it seemed like every other book I read had something to do with humans having sex with dolphins. I have no idea what that was about, by by the third one I had to think, “Okay what prompted THIS?” I thought, maybe it just happened that I picked out three books with sex-with-dolphins as kind of a premise since I don’t always document or even notice my selection process but no, they were all published about the same year.

I know authors who are afraid to read much in case they unintentionally plagiarize. I have also heard of publishing houses that tell their authors not to read certain things, to avoid even the appearance. Or something…I don’t know. The thing is that if you’re a writer you have to read a lot.

But here’s the thing, if you give a bunch of authors the same premise and even the same first sentence, they will all come up with something different. If you are not actually plagiarizing, it will be different. So don’t worry. Just write your book.

9

This is a true story, hand to G-d. When I was in junior high, in 1979, I wrote a short story (it was about 15 handwritten notebook pages) about five siblings whose parents were killed in a car crash by a drunk driver. The oldest was 19, and the youngest was a baby. They wanted to stay together, so the oldest tried to get custody of the younger ones. They had to sell their parents’ house and move into a small apartment, and the youngest boy (the fourth youngest kid) had a tent in the living room in order to have his own space.

After I wrote it, I decided it was really stupid, and threw it away.

If I’d saved it, then maybe in 1994, I could have sued the “Party of Five” people.

The thing was, I really thought it was stupid, and maudlin, and unbelievable, and never told anyone about it, so I know it’s absolutely impossible that, short of ESP, Party of Five was anything but a coincidence.

Oh, and my title? “Responsible Party.”