Originally published on Facebook 4 December 2011.
Guys, with recent high-profile plagiarism cases on everybody’s mind, I keep receiving emails from new or aspiring writers who want to know how to keep from second-guessing themselves when starting a new story, how to know that their story isn’t “too much like” some other famous piece some other person is already written.
Here is the answer. It’s very simple.
Do the work, step by step.
Create your characters. Figure out who they are. Figure out how they speak, and what they care about. Figure out why they conflict with others, and how. Determine what their problems are. Concoct a starting situation and have events follow naturally. When you have something to describe, describe it in your own voice. Don’t force innovation onto the page; see it as a series of problems that you need to resolve in order to get the narrative down. Introduce complications where you feel they belong, and have your characters react to them as they must.
You may find, upon doing all this, that you’ve come up with a situation that simply travels a path well-worn by others. Ah, well. True, startling originality is rare, and some paths become well-worn simply because they’re the most natural. But if you try to build a house and you’ve built your own frame, hammered in your own nails, put up your own wallpaper, constructed your own furniture, and spawned your own characters to inhabit it, then all of it still reflects your own creative DNA, reflecting both your strengths and your weaknesses. And if it’s totally derivative, down to the point of being unpublishable because of it — a difficult proposition given the past success of the Shannara books — then so what; “derivative” is not the same thing as “plagiaristic.” And more importantly, you’ve shucked your paralysis and DONE it, meaning that you can now do it again, and try to do it better next time. You can’t let the editor in your head keep you on such a tight leash that you never move. You’ve got to throw caution to the winds and do it, before you look back and see what you’ve done.
There’s this, too. While unconscious plagiarism exists, the kind we’ve seen recently was very much conscious and deliberate. It took work, possibly even more work than sitting down and writing the story. Your concern over the issue shows that you’re an unlikely candidate to commit the sin, in the same way that your concern about possibly saying something wrong makes you an less likely person to cause scandalous offense at a party. The people who care, who question themselves, are less likely to sin than those who act as social bulldozers, never giving a care to consequence. How do you know you’re not committing plagiarism? Chances are, you know because you care enough to ask the question.
Comment By: Patrick RichardsFink
December 4th, 2015 at 11:17 am
My first trunk novel ripped off: the scene where the Terminator arrives in the present, the scene where Vader steps off the shuttle on the second Death Star to meet the emperor, and the social structure of Julian May’s Intervention novels. I wasn’t until a year later when I went back for a re-read before consigning it to the bottom of the trunk that I realized why those scenes felt so natural and easy as they flowed off my pen.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
December 4th, 2015 at 11:18 am
Yes, and one of my Vossoff and Nimmitz stories uses a shtick from THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
Comment By: Greg Cox
December 4th, 2015 at 11:18 am
True plagiarism is not so much about stealing “ideas” as stealing execution: the structure, the syntax, the actual paragraphs and prose. Writing a vampire novel in the style of Anne Rice is just derivative; literally copying whole chunks of prose and just changing the character names is plagiarism.
In my experience, the worst plagiarists have no idea they’re doing anything wrong, and are fundamentally confused on the difference between “research” and just copying. They’re like the kid who writes a book report by just copying the jacket copy and maybe switching a word or two around . . . . .
Comment By: John Trumbull
December 4th, 2015 at 11:18 am
Great advice, Adam! I’ll take it to heart.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
December 4th, 2015 at 11:18 am
Look. At least three times in my career I said, at the onset of a story, I am going to emulate this author, with this piece, and in particular a specific story. In none of the cases did I say, “I want to write a story that hits the precise notes, with theall three cases I said, “I want this story to be strong in the same way this other story is strong.” In all three cases I aimed high, at classics. That I then *did the work* and produced work that nobody could call a ripoff, is proof of principle.
Oh, what the hell. I will tell you one of them. When I wrote “Of A Sweet Slow Dance In the Wake of Temporary Dogs,” still one of my best three stories, it was because I had said to myself, “It’s time I wrote my ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.'” I was not, emphatically not, interested in emulating the first story’s speculative conceit, or its non-plot structure, or any of its particulars — just being strong in the sense that it was strong. I went off in my own direction. The stories have been compared to one another. But by God are they different pieces of work, and I have absolutely no self-consciousness about admitting that appreciation of le Guin’s work — and a deliberate misread of a Joe Haldeman title, “The Forever War,” as “The intermittent War,” — were major parts of my initial conception process.
Comment By: Greg Cox
December 4th, 2015 at 11:18 am
To continue the house metaphor used in the original article. It’s not about building a house by hand, copying the basic layout and techniques used to build other houses. It’s about moving into a house someone else built, slapping on a fresh coat of paint, and claiming you built it yourself.
Comment By: Morgan Smith
December 4th, 2015 at 12:17 pm
It would be really hard to come up with a plot that didn’t follow, structurally, at least the majority of elements in most other plots, and still have a plot.
Mind you, the first short story I ever wrote ripped off the “locked door” mystery from the Book of Daniel in the Bible, so what do I know?
Comment By: David Vineyard
December 4th, 2015 at 12:17 pm
I don’t dare read Hemingway when I am starting a novel because the rhythms are easy to emulate.
In general accidental plagiarism is easy to avoid, though in homage it can be harder.
Comment By: Linda Robinson
December 4th, 2015 at 12:17 pm
I have a situation where I’ve turned over a particular scene in my head for so long, I no longer remember whether it’s actually mine or if I unintentionally swiped it from someone. *sigh* And of course when I first started thinking about it, I wasn’t smart enough to write the damn thing down, just stored it in the wetware.
Comment By: Eric Magnuson
December 4th, 2015 at 1:20 pm
This fear has strangled me to point where I rarely write any more. A shame really and not much of an excuse but there it is: I’m so afraid of being a hack I’ve virtually abandoned creative prose for consuption other than my own.
Comment By: David Vineyard
December 4th, 2015 at 4:17 pm
How does it go, genius steaks from everyone.
Comment By: Gill Avila
December 5th, 2015 at 5:21 am
“Nevsky’s Demon” by Dmitri Gat is a line-for-line paraphrase of John D. MacDonald’s “The Dreadful Lemon Sky.” Gat said that he didn’t know that you weren’t allowed to do that.
Comment By: Jim Wright
December 5th, 2015 at 2:17 pm
Or, you could just say screw it and go right ahead and steal other people’s work, sand off the serial numbers, and publish it as your own and then get all huffy when you’re called on it. Happens to me all the time, which is why I’m on the verge of going all Harlan Ellison all of the damned time.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
December 5th, 2015 at 8:17 pm
You could. Of course, if you would, you are not my target audience here, the new writers who actually worry about doing this accidentally and want to know how to avoid it.
Comment By: David Vineyard
December 5th, 2015 at 11:18 pm
Raymond Chandler copied a 10,000 word story by Erle Stanley Gardner when he started rewriting it in his voice, then admitted it was good enough he was unhappy he could not use it. Most of us know the feeling but try to avoid actually doing it if we can.
Comment By: Gill Avila
December 6th, 2015 at 1:18 am
Just listened to “He’s So Fine” and “My Sweet Lord.” Both are fine with me.
Comment By: David Vineyard
December 4th, 2016 at 9:22 pm
Actual legal plagiarism is pretty cut and dried. The most famous cases that were actually litigated and won being William Faulkner’s SANCTUARY vs James Hadley Chase’s NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH and John D. MacDonald’s THE EMPTY COPPER SEA vs Dimitri Gat’s NEVSKY’S DEMON. In both cases it was obvious. A touchier subject was THE WIND DONE GONE retelling GONE WITH THE WIND from the slaves point of view but ultimately the courts ruled the author was rewriting Mitchell and thus crossed the legal line going beyond pastiche, parody, or homage.
Pretty much you can’t end your book with “Isn’t it pretty to think so,” unless you are quoting Hemingway.
Comment By: Roxane Farrell Murray
December 4th, 2016 at 9:22 pm
There is plagiarism, and there is what Tolkien referred to–I think it was in “On Fairy Stories,” but I may be wrong after all these years–as the soup kettle. The idea was that everyone who tells a story contributes to the pot and ladles stuff out of it.