posted
Just this morning while performing grass-growing-is-more-interesting tasks at work, an idea popped into my head. I chewed it out, and before I knew it, I had most of a science fiction murder mystery plotted out before me. Characters, culture, a whole buncha stuff.
Only problem is---the idea that the whole thing turns on---well, it isn't mine. It's probably a really old idea, but, well, the detail work that makes it work for me all derives from a couple or three stories by a well-known SF writer, all published about thirty years ago. I could write it up, but I think it'd be real obvious where it came from.
Without that idea, I don't have a story.
I think I'll plow through a set of outlines and notes, though. I need the practice, and I may see some way of filing off the serial numbers and passing it off.
posted
Sit down, write ABOUT the story, telling what happens all the way through. sort of a combinatin of a synopsis, outline, story. Once you have written this out, two or three pages, then decide if you want to do more, or how to do more.
I prefer to write these straight through, no editing. Once it is done, then one can play. One can tell the major actions and some needed details of a novel in a few pages. you can see if there are serious problems with the story, and whether it is even any good.
If there is a problem with the plot of what you wrote, you can change it easy to fit somthing better.
The greatest thing about this method is that you will have the excitement of starting a new story, finishing a new story and not have done a lot of work.
another is that this can be the foundation of your synopsis later.
And, if you choose to make a plot while writing the novel, you can test it in the short, and see if it will work.
posted
I'm not sure what the problem is. Ideas aren't copyrighted or copyrightable. Execution, well now, that's everything.
Even, as an example, one of OSC's ideas for Ender's Game that children playing what they think are training videos are waging a war isn't protected as an idea. Think of the movie [w] War Games [/b]. It had the same main plot idea with a twist or three. The idea (inadvertantly waging war when playing a "game") could be used again but the spin or take has to be something different. Stargate Atlantis just used it. Could you use the Ender character? NO! Could you use the concept? Yes.
posted
there was another thread recently about utilizing ideas from other peoples' work. It involved somebody using the word mithril from Tolkien's world. I think the first thing I would do is google the writer and try to figure out who has legal rights, and what their rules are. And then look up some info on copywritable ideas. I have a friend right now who is writing a book based on characters from an old TV show, and it's been quite interesting as she describes the legal process around this. Get the facts first, don't hesitate because you don't know for sure.
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posted
OSC's advice on coming up with ideas, as I remember it from somewhere, was to write them all down and sooner or later another idea will come along that will mesh with this one. Combine the two and you have a working story. So even if this doesn't work for you right now, it may work eventually.
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posted
30 years old isn't old, but it isn't young either. There is a whole new generation of people, few of who might have read those books who might enjoy your new synthesis of them. I say write them, continuing ideas is one of the ways the good ones survive forever.
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posted
Since the idea has already been written, why not tell us what it is. Unless it is something really specific, you don't have a problem. For example, almost all of the "ideas" in The Di Vinci Code were published years earlier in an Uncle Scrooge comic book story by Don Rosa. The idea in the movie The Sting was used earlier in a radio episode of The Third Man. The idea of the hit TV show Heroes was used earlier in the flop TV show The 7700. Even if your idea is a boy wizard fighting a dark lord at a school for wizards, or a halfling fighting a dark lord by throwing his ring into a volcano, or a young man fighting a dark lord who turns out to be his father, you don't violate any copyright. That last plot was used by Jack Kirby in New Gods before George Lucas swiped it.
Now, if your idea is a cartoon mouse with a girlfriend named Minnie fighting a dark lord named Black Pete, you have a problem.
posted
I think right now it's too specifically that idea to be disguised---the first, "murder" scene in my idea derives directly from the opening scene in one of the writer's short stories. (It was never collected, or at least I never saw it in one of the writer's collections, but I ran across it in a "best of the year" anthology.) I didn't like the story or the characters, or even some of the uses the idea was put to, but I liked the idea itself---I was an impressionable teen then and these lurid things impressed me no end in those days.
Though the idea isn't new, I don't think I could write that opening scene without someone somewhere spotting the similarity. But I plan on plowing through an outline, once I work out a few more details.
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