I find that the majority of the ideas and themes that emerge in my writing are not my own. Rather, they come from a variety of influences including other books, essays, radio vignettes, audio journals, etc. You often hear that a particular author was influenced by the thinking or philosophy of one of their contemporaries. Where is the distinction between plagiarizing someone else’s ideas vs. simply giving their ideas form through the story? When is it necessary to explicitly acknowledge someone else’s influence on the story?
Thanks,
Brian
[This message has been edited by reid (edited May 29, 2002).]
Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :
Ideas can not be plagarized. Prose, poetry, description, characters, stories, articles, sections of text, stuff that someone has written down after working on it can be plagarized.
That's why writing can be copyrighted but ideas can't.
Every writer puts ideas together in different combinations from the combinations created by every other writer.
There is nothing wrong with taking an idea from some other writer and using it in combination with your own ideas.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, especially if you know how to look for them. The writing is what's hard.
I attended a speech given by Jane Yolen on the famous question people seem to always ask writers: Where do you get your ideas? and she complained that they made it sound like this was the hard part.
(I suspect that people are actually asking how a particular idea came together with other ideas and turned into a story, which is one part of the hard part.)
So don't worry about ideas. They're all over the place and free to everyone.
Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :
If you've ever read a book or story and thought that you would have done things differently from the protagonist (or any of the main characters, really), then you have the essential basis for an original treatment of an old theme.
All of the themes worth writing about have already been written about in one form or another, because human problems are human problems, when you get right down to it. But your responses, your individual answers to those problems, are going to be essentially unique to yourself.
Plot is composed of two essential elements, when you come right down to it. Problem is the first element, and solution is the second. You're only really stealing an idea if you steal the solution that someone else imagined (nobody thought up the problems, they just happen to exist in human experience).
Posted by Chuckles (Member # 1331) on :
One of the things I do to try and keep from writing something that's been written before is to draw my ideas either out of thin air or out of non-fiction. New Scientist magazine is a fabulous source of scientific fodder. Most of my ideas actually come from stupid stories in the new -- the stories of ridiculous greed, vanity, wealth, cruelty etc. of the human race. Drawing your ideas from the news has the advantage that it's fresh, and also that you're less likely to get deeply involved in writing only to have someone say "hey, isn't this that book by [insert famous author here]?"
Take care -Justin-
Posted by MrWhipple (Member # 1436) on :
Rule One: everyone steals. Some just do it better than others. Shakspear stole from Marlowe and he stole from a bunch of Roman guys who didn't have an origonal bone in thier bodies and stole everything from the Greeks. It goes all the way back to some guy named Grok who sat around a campfire to keep the tribe entertained on cold nights. Don't wory about it, just write.