Comments on: JWAM reader request no. 9: Plot similarities

By: gabriel

gabriel — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:36:31 +0000

guys can i ask you something, if i make a novel like this. kid got a new “psp” which he discovers a secret button on the back, presses it then a wormhole appears, didnt go in at first but next time he tried it and went in…reappeared in another earth..etc etc..

question is… will Sony Sue me if i use “PSP” ? and if i emphasize on Playstation portable on my words.. ?
waddaya thnk should i do? make it “GSP” or “KSP” or somethin??

By: Justine

Justine — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:24:01 +0000

Ian: So pleased to be of help and that you learned that Robin Wasserman is not evil.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:27:53 +0000

This is exactly the article I’ve been looking for! I’m in ninth grade now and ever since the 7th I’ve had this idea about abilities and memory loss that I had finally started writing this year. Then all of a sudden my friend comes up to me and say “your idea’s already taken”. At first I thought “It’s okay, telekinesis is always in books”. But then he told he about the whole memory loss thing and I started freaking out. I started to not like Robin Wasserman but… I was curious to see just how similar our stories were. I checked out her books from the library. I read the first one and I calmed down. Her story was very interesting but I realized that the stories were actually really different. It’s really funny how these things turn out, right?

By: Elle

Elle — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:05:34 +0000

I think there are degrees of plagiarism, and themes, concepts, characters etc that develop out of the creative process can become an original piece of work just as ingredients in cooking may be used by anyone, but might make a completely new kind of cake in the hands of a particular cook. For another cook to copy the finished cake and make one very similar on the grounds that the ingredients were not copyright, in my opinion would be wrong.
But it wouldn’t matter as long as the first cook was credited as the creator of the cake, and the second cake came later.

By: Alexa

Alexa — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:51:01 +0000

I’m really enjoying and learning a lot form your posts, especially today and yesterdays.
Thanks

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:05:50 +0000

This makes me feel loads better in many different ways. Even though I’ve heard some of it before, it’s nice to hear from someone with experience and authority.

Totally unrelated to writing, but what are some of the best zombie books to read? It seems like all the vampires are overshadowing other types of “humanity-impaired” beings.

By: lauren myracle

lauren myracle — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:40:07 +0000

Justine, you are so very brilliant. Could I please be brilliant like you? And! I got Love Is Hell today, and it is goooooorrrrr-juice. Can’t wait to dive in!

By: Diana Peterfreund

Diana Peterfreund — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:53:22 +0000

PixelFish, that’s terrifying. The bit about your mom locking you up in a mausoleum.

AlisonG, I think the fact that there are already TWO stories about this is proof positive that there are different way to tell the stories. It’s interesting, but there seems to be a number of saturation points when it comes to plots. If there is ONE successful story out there about X (magical wizarding schools, vampire boy falling in love with a girl, hot girl who slays magical creatures, single girl in city who has shopping/dating/work woes), then another one is a “rip off.” If there are two or more, then it’s a trend, and you can feel free to put your spin on it however you like (influx of children learning magical things at magical schools, legions of vampires falling in love with humans, whole armies of urban fantasy heroines fighting bad magical things, chick lit as a recognized genre) until you reach the second saturation, which is, “if I read about one more vampire boy falling in love with a human girl, I’m going to commit homicide.”

By: PixelFish

PixelFish — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:17:09 +0000

I pretty much had that flipping out over plot similarities thing because a graphic novel I’d been working on and off forever–I have sketches on Elfwood from way back when–has a kid being raised in a graveyard*, and well, you can see why I would flip out when Neil Gaiman announced he was writing a novel about a kid being raised in a graveyard.

Anyway I told my friend Frank (who happened to be a junior editor at a magazine for a certain SF property involving a galaxy far far away) about how woe is me, I can never use this story because nobody will ever believe I didn’t steal the idea from Neil Gaiman. And Frank said, “Calm down. Even if you have similar starting points, you won’t write the same story. You are two different writers and the journey should be sufficiently different.” He did advise letting it sit and marinate for a while, mind you, because people might not want a kid-raised-in-a-graveyard story for a while, but later, who knows.

Anyways, parallel development is just one of those things you have to deal with in a society that has a lot of free-range information, strong cultural archetypes, and ideas bouncing up against each other like demented molecules. The bouncing is good though–because while the components of the core ideas might be similar, as they accrete to other ideas, the new molecules become different.

*My kid in a graveyard story is based on a childhood incident where my mother accidentally locked me into the Salt Lake City Mausoleum as a wee tyke and left me by myself for an hour or so. I always wondered what would become of me if she never came back.