Borrowing Okay?

I love to write. Seriously. It just seems that whenever I get something good, it seems to be from a seed of an idea that came up while I was reading something else. I sit down to write it out and I say to myself, No, don't worry about it, the fundamental idea is similar, but you don't have the same characters or even the same plot line. It'll be completely different.

This never works. The further I get, the more obvious these similarities seem, until they're so glaring that I just have to assume that every one in the world is going to look at it and go, "Oh, did you just read --- ?" In retrospect, it really wouldn't be obvious at all to other readers but it makes me feel like such a fraud.

I hate this feeling. It's a terrible, crummy, guilty feeling and I guess all I'm asking is if it really is a crime to take other people's ideas and change them and mess with them and cut parts out and add parts in so that they become yours? They say that writers are readers moved to emulation, but I'm not so sure. _/) Any opinions?

Imitation is the best way to learn. Children do it when they learn to speak, walk, think. Human beings learn by repetition for the most part. The more you mimic things you like, the more you play with the ideas of the great writers and great storytellers of the english language, the more you'll be honing your skill to form a story, and to write it.

There's not anything new written under the sun, or told, or imagined, if you will. But people are unique. It's your voice and POV that make something yours.


With all that in mind, you may never end up finishing or publishing what you've gotten directly from reading others. It may always be a warm-up of sorts. But in my experience, sometimes some of the best stories come up from small things or ideas I've read about - but they take time to become mine. And often after a year or two of hanging around, they're entirely unrecognizable.

It's a good beginning often enough. I woudn't say it's a middle, or an end. Certainly it's not a crime.

--

My two cents...hopefully, they're helpful. I know how you feel, DD - I had a terrible arid, dead time in my writing when I worried about never having a useful or interesting thought that wasn't 'ripped-off'.

There is a theory that says "art is dead" - not necessarily meaning that there's no point in creative writing, but rather that you're only the latest in a long line of artistic and literary geniuses: standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were. I don't think you should worry if your writing reminds someone of Kay or Buchan or Orwell or whoever: despite an image or a sentance that may seem to have come right from their heads, your style will still develop into one that is obviously and discernably your own.

Tad Williams wrote that a good author should "read like a butterfly, write like a bee" and I'm inclined to agree: if you read/see/hear something that changes your world, by all means pay homage to it with your own work, and don't feel you're being disrespectful - imitation is the highest form of flattery. Just give it time, and people will be doing the same for you.

I know I borrow frequently too. ^_^ Whenever I read something particularly amazing, I have to try it for myself. Therefore, you will see little bits of C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, Lois Lowry, Dr. Suess, Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain, Sterling North, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Jack London, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Pullman, Tamora Pierce, George Bernard Shaw, Homer... the list goes on.

But still. One thing you can do is read more. See how many people I listed off the top of my head? There are little parts (I can identify most of the little parts) that ring of their style, but, because of the mix, it doesn't sound like their style. It becomes mine. So vary your reading. Finally, you will have so many voices talking to you through the story that you cannot help but to form your own voice.

Also, read smartly. What do you like about the certain plot of theirs? List the aspects, analyze it to death, do ANYTHING. Why? This analyzation will tell you not only what their style is, but WHY their stlye is. That's an important distinction.

If you can, don't just do one plot from your favorite author. Do SEVERAL plots from several different authors. For example, I'm doing a story that is an allegory (aka, uses the bible), is set in a grim depressing world where feelings cannot be shown (aka, 1984, George Orwell), where the protagonist is naive and is beginning to see things in a different light (aka, The Giver, Lois Lowry). The story would be considered a sci-fi that deals with characters trying to overthrow the system that they live under now (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein) and the story is very concerned in seeing the societal impact change has (Foundations, Isaac Asimov). It is written in a simple manner (Just-so Stories, Rudyard Kipling) but it still deals with things at a much larger level.

Yep. I could go on and on talking about what characters I pulled from my novel, ("Sadie's father," the character in FREAK, is actually a heavily edited version of Lyra's father from "His Dark Materials.") But still.

So... your task? Read a lot more. It'll make your writing a whole lot richer.

"Borrowing" is okay. I borrow all the time. However, as the definition of borrowing requires giving it back at some time, I also give back the ideas that I took. That sounds a little odd, but let me explain.

The stories that I'm working on right now exist in a world where there's a group of people that live almost entirely on ships. I got the idea while reading Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk (both by Rafael Sabatini). I was really caught up in the idea of sailing and living on the oceans so I took some of the ideas from those two books and tweaked them and worked with them until I had a completely different story for my own writing. Then I could "give back" the ideas that I had taken and continue on with the new ones.

You have to imitate at first to just get the hang of things. But then, you can take what you've imitated and tweak and rework it to make it your own.

Borrowing and imitation are just fine, as long as you're not just changing a few words. I know you're not, I'm just saying. Heck, I've doen that myself more than once. After I had my five main characters and their personalities and begun work on a series, I realized that four of them were almost perfect personality copies of four characters of the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate. Once I saw it, it was almost scary. In the end though, I believe that they'll be different enough so that even I won't see them as copies. As long as you take a general idea and put more than a few twists of your own, you should be just fine.

And Snoink, I do something like that a lot. I take a general idea I liked from someplace I could never remember and make a general story. From that, multitudes spawn that are very similar to each other, but with unique and subtle differences, just enough to not be considered copies. The trick with doing it to another author's story is to make sure you take the idea and truely make it your own.

Thank you guys very much. This was starting to bother me hugely and I had to get it out there.
Thank you, Imp, for the encouragemet - it's nice to know that at least someone has gone/is going through the same crummy thing.
Snoink! I can't believe you've read Asimov's Foundation! I thought no one really read that sort of thing anymore. And actually, I really do read a broad variety of authors. It used to be pretty much CJ Cherryh because I was so completely queer for her Faded Sun Trilogy, but by now I've grown out of idolizing the first thing I see and have really tried to 'broaden my horizons', if you will. (With John Steinbeck, William Golding, Arthur Golden, Khaled Hosseini, Daniel Keyes, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, David Gerrold, Heather Sellers, Gina Oschner and, of course, Leo Tolstoy, just to name a few.)
Duskglimmer, Roaming Shadow and backgroundbob, thanks so much! _/)
I'm am deeply grateful.

These are interesting points.

I can't believe you've read Asimov's Foundation

...

is there anyone who *hasn't*?

No one I know has.

Borrowing = okay, if you're just using it as a stepping-stool

There is a fine line between borrowing and plagiarism though. Be careful.

I understand the fine line, Galatea. I will never/have never palgarized, I just want to make sure it's okay to use little bits of other people's ideas. Thank you so much for your comment. _/)

In this day and age, people can get all up in a huff if you have a conversation with them and then write something based off of something they said. This happened to me in highschool. A friend who turned out to be a not so great person was extremely upset with me when I sent a short story she had helped me develop off to a magazine. She hadn't actually written any of it, but had helped me to flesh out my ideas and really bring it to something worthwhile. She freaked out that I had sent it with only MY NAME on it. Never mind that I asked a dedication to her be included...

In a world of frivilous law-suits, I'm just saying--Watch your back.

Gotcha.

Snoink has the right idea. I had the problem, when I was in my early/mid-teens where I wrote a story and it was obvious to anyone familiar with the story I had based it on that I was doing a retelling of it. The thing to do is read everything you can get your hands on and also watch a wide variety of movies, TV shows, and plays. In one of my novels, the first draft I did was obvious, but I was not reading a wide variety at the time. Then after I'd read a lot of new things and learned more about story-telling, I decided to ditch the two major elements that made it obvious. There is still a resemblence, of course. But then again, someone once told me, after reading the first chapter, that it sounded like the story-line in a video game I'd never heard of. It's nearly impossible to tell a story that doesn't look a lot like another, especially now. People have been doing it intentionally for hundreds of years before there were copywright laws. The thing to do it put your own personality in it, and not worry too much unless it bears a too-obvious resemblance to a famous movie or novel and you intend to pulish it.