As a result of last week’s post, I ended up in what I thought an interesting email exchange about worldbuilding, and stealing ideas. What’s stealing when it comes to ideas? It’s clear that though the text doesn’t change, we don’t all read the same book, so what about our understanding of, and use of, ideas? And does ‘ideas’ include people, events, and paradigms, whether real or fictional?
Such a broad question, I thought it might be fun to look at it from a few perspectives.
Adopting ideas
James D. Macdonald of Yog’s Law sometimes jokes that one of his other Laws is: If you are going to steal, steal from the best.
By that he means, use the tactics and strategy of the Battle of Salamis Bay if you’re going to posit a naval attack on a coastal city with a narrow access. He means, use the myth of Orpheus if you’re thinking of playing with themes of death and rebirth. Read up on Genghis Khan and his Mongols if you’re thinking of forming a story around a bunch of fast-moving space pirates who strike asteroid outposts and run.
So that’s deliberate adopting—taking some sort of historical fact, person, situation, cultural idea, and reshaping it for fiction.
Adoption also seems to extend to tropes. These appear to go in waves of popularity. Urban Fantasy in particular; for a time everyone seemed to be doing elves and the Sidhe followed by everyone doing vampires followed by everyone doing demons.
One question I’ve found cropping up is: Is there such a thing as unconscious stealing?
In a discussion of favorite books a year or two ago, someone commented about how a current popular writer had developed a clever twist on elves (“can’t create”), but some of us oldsters pointed out that the twist was introduced by Elizabeth Marie Pope in The Perilous Gard back in the mid-seventies.
It was suggested that the author in question had probably read Pope as a kid, and forgot the book in subsequent reading, so when she came to write her book, the twist seemed to be hers. When we’re kid readers, we can get so passionate we’ll read a book over and over, then move on. The book sinks into unconscious memory rather than conscious, and becomes part of one’s creative landscape.
How many writers here have written something—fictional or an idea of some kind—that leaped into the brain as whole, unique, individual. . . . and after you chance to reread an old favorite, ooops, you discover your nifty idea right there in print? The original may even read badly now—very different—but you still recognize the source.
That’s happened to me with some of the stuff I read before I was ten, then didn’t look at again for decades. Like Enid Blyton’s Adventure series. Rereading the books forty years later (and squinting to try to recapture that pulse-pounding joy of my nine year old self) led me to scenes that laid unsettling palimpsests behind my eyes, scenes from my stories overlaid on these old books. I don’t even know if these brief moments would be recognizable to anyone but me, but I recognized the source. . . bringing me to conscious borrowings of paradigms, characters, or plots—AKA—
Filing off the serial numbers
Readers sometimes exclaim about this or that book, “This is Trek with the serial numbers filed off!” Things I have recognized in various forms: Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings (epic fantasy of the seventies and early eighties), Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles (not the Niccolo ones), and more recently, Patrick O’Brian, just to name a new.
Homage? Pastiche? Sometimes the project starts out as fanfiction. But then in developing the side-characters, or the world, or both, the writer begins to feel that her story is changing so rapidly that to try to confine it to canon is to stifle it. So she looks at it, realizes that if she changes Frodo to a woman, Gandalf to an ancient tiger-lizard, and Middle Earth into the desert-archipelago of Snaeb Eefoc, with Evil Z’y’or off to the west instead of the east, hey, new story, entirely her own . . . except readers still recognize the familiar shape.
Some writers have changed superficial details of familiar stories and made tons of money doing it. For many readers, knowing exactly how the story is going to go is a feature, not a bug.
But even in these, the writer is bringing his or her own experience to the tale, or commenting on it in literary form. Sometimes the reader can find hints of what the writer found fascinating in the original tale and inspired her to delve deeper into some aspect of the story that the original writer left open. Or dealt with, but unsatisfyingly. The new story, if successful, is engaging with the original.
It’s interesting to look at reader responses to fictions that seem to be in conversation with another piece of fiction. Like Maguire’s Wicked and the Oz stories. There are some who never read Oz (but who saw the MGM film as a kid) who loved Wicked as a clever story on its own. And there are Oz readers who said, “In spite of the familiar names, this has nothing to do with Oz.” Same text, but reads radically different.
The same has been said about Lev Grossman’s The Magicians being a postmodern, college-age Harry Potter. The reviews at Amazon are interesting for not only the spectrum of reaction but readers’ patterns of engagement with the inspirational material. Would The Magicians have been written without Harry Potter appearing first—or been as successful?
Extending ideas, or fanfictions
Whenever I’ve heard someone say that fanfiction is merely bad rewriting of someone else’s work, I ask if they’ve actually read any. Most of the time I get an answer that boils down to “I don’t have to—I know it’s bad,” but once in a while I get a sneered “One was enough,” or the like.
Which is fine—fanfiction varies in quality like everything else, and even if a piece is universally proclaimed for its excellence, not everything is going to please every reader. I’ve heard Shakespeare derided as a plagiarist of medieval ideas.
Part of fanfiction’s draw is how the fiction brings to it all the hidden power of the canon. The stories assume that you know canon—they are not written in a way that brings you into the world. It’s not that the writers aren’t capable of it. But a person writing a Harry Potter fanfic will not pause the story while Snape lectures the Slytherins about what a Horcrux is. The characters know what it is as well as the reader.
Fanfiction can also work against a writer (see Harold Bloom on The Anxiety of Influence), if the fanfiction does not strike the reader as true to canon, or disappoints the reader in some way. The best ones, though, either seem to extend the canon for readers, or they are transformative, that is, they create a literary dialogue with the canon.
One still needs the canon for context. I saw this illustrated when I looked at some popular fanvids. The vids from unfamiliar films and shows were just rapid-fire pretty actors in provocative poses, with a succession of objects that made as much sense to me as does the placement of seemingly random, sometimes eerily peculiar decorative motifs in Mannerist portraits, all of which symbolized a great deal to people of the time. If I saw the film or show and came back to the vid, the now-recognized scenes and symbols hyperlinked me into layers of meaning.
I don’t mean to overlook the vexing aspect to fanfiction, which is that it is legally unpublishable for money, as it trespasses on copyright. Though I myself wish to protect my own copyrights, I am also aware that copyright is actually a very new concept, flashily modern if one looks at the history of literature. A thousand years ago, everybody who was everybody in the fiction world was writing Arthuriana.
The idea of copyright is taking increasing heat as publishing on the Internet becomes easier than ever. It’s watched anxiously by those of us who try to earn our living by the pen, just as has happened for centuries.
However, this riff is not about copyright so much as the caring and sharing of fictional ideas. Aristotle pointed out long ago that historians talk about what happened, and poets talk about what might happen. If one takes the long view, literature is nothing more—nothing less—than a centuries-long conversation mirroring the evolution of civilization, each generation taking certain ideas, toying with them in might-happen fashion, and reflecting them back for the next generation to take in, and engage with in turn.
There are so many forms of influence, and dialoging with influential fictions, and with one another, and it has been going on for a very long time, some say since humans first took up some ash from a fire and drew with a forefinger on a rock. To shift from scales to quills, Shakespeare was indeed a magpie, ‘stealing’ bits and bones from older sources and refashioning them into such effective fictions that he not only reinvented playwriting, he reinvented us.
Hi Sherwood.
A long time ago, I thought Shakespeare was one of the most innovative playwrights in terms of his plot and characters, not knowing he had mined history, myth and his fellow playwrights for inspiration. He did it better, and did it so well that he made them his. He reinvented play writing, as you say.
I do think a lot of unconscious influences moves us in our writing. And sometimes, what a reader might perceive as influence really isn’t. I recently read a book by an author whose motifs and ideas seemed extremely reminiscent of a book from a certain SF author from the 70′s and the 80′s. Said author, in conversation online, told me he had never read the book in question, even if I made the logical leap that he did.
Yes–it can be dangerous to assume that someone was influenced by a work when the ideas were floating around the Zeitgeist at the time.
Some days it seems to be impossible to invent something new, or even a new combination. I have a novel I’m polishing where one of the protagonists is the son of a fairly traditional Navajo man and a Jewish lawyer from New York who he met while serving in the Army, and persuaded to come home with him. I worried a bit at first that this combination was far-fetched, then someone showed me a link to a non-profit group called the Walking Stick foundation dedicated to “recovery and preservation of indigenous spirituality.” I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased that my idea wasn’t unbelievable, or to bang my head on the screen in frustration because now everyone would assume this group was the inspiration for the story.
haha–I’ve had that experience too: invented things and then found out there are real-world analogues.
Ohhhh yes. I’ve come across situations where I thought, no one will believe this, and dang if not a day (or a week or even a month) later someone points to some program or blog, where the thing is old news.
When I’ve talked with friends about storythings, and ideas have been flashing this way and that, people are always quick to reassure each other that even if we were all to write on X or Y idea, the story would come out differently, and that’s true–which helps alleviate anxiety over peer-to-peer idea theft.
The zeitgeist is a powerful thing–who’d have thought you’d have *two* Snow White-based movies at movie theaters at the same time?
When and how are you allowed to use a character from a work that’s under copyright, if at all? Can you write a story about a bunch of kids who find Hermione Granger wandering around it their town and are astounded to see someone from fiction alive in their reality? I’m guessing no, you can’t. But if you create a girl from a (fictional) wildly popular book about kids at a wizard school–someone whom people will recognize as a Hermione analogue–then that’s all right, I believe… or is it? I wonder.
I’m pretty sure it’s okay to do that. Though readers will sharply divide–some will be utterly disgusted at the similarity to Hermione . . . and others will be absolutely thrilled.
As long as you scrap off the serial numbers, it’s fine.
You might get away with parody even if you kept the name.
OTOH, you have to convince me that the characters really read and liked the books, fictional or not. That is one flaw in The Magicians — the Pillory series came across to me as a lame copy of Narnia, so the real thing didn’t really disappoint. For a good example, try Dorothy Gilman’s Tightrope Walker.
There was a recent court case about an author who wrote a novel about Holden Caulfield as an adult, and the author was sued by Salinger’s estate. The author won.
That said, do you really want the financial juggernaut that is Rowling’s legal team aimed at you and everything you own?
As most professional authors will tell you, ideas are easy. Having the craft and the time to use them aren’t so easy.
There’s a line in one of TS Eliot’s critical essays, in which he says ‘Bad poets borrow; good poets steal’, which I think may be the difference between ‘this is just X with the numbers filed off’ and somebody taking an idea or a plot twist or a world-building item and doing something with it that makes it theirs, even if somebody else did it first. (Eliot, of course, would know all about borrowing and stealing and being in a dynamic relationship with previous works!) And some ideas are just so resonant and cool, or possibly just timely, that they float off to become part of the pool of available things that writers dip into.
I think that’s what the literary types mean by ‘transformative’–a term that seems slippery to grasp, at least for me. (Some days it’s ahah, others, huh?)
I tend to find that one person’s “transformative” (or “filing the serial numbers off” — I tend to use this term in a much more positive sense than you did in this post) is another person’s “clone”, based on how experienced and/or sympathetic the reader in question is.
Another question to consider alongside all of what you’ve brought up here is the cultural value of “originality”. People really seem to privilege things being new and different for its own sake, and often conflate novelty with quality in weird ways.
This is true, but my understanding is that this is the long problem of the sophisticate who has sought that which he or she enjoys so long that satiation sets in, and thus, an over-valuation of pique and surprise.
See, possibly this is me being an especially snobby sophisticate? But my experience of the problem has actually been in people proclaiming something to be amazing! and novel! and wonderfully new! while I’m over here cocking my head at it and going, “Um, guys? Do you ever read X? Or Y? Or Z, for that matter?”
All of which is to say that satiation is one issue, but ignorance of what’s gone before – and thus incorrectly identifying novelty – is another.
Yep. I don’t think that’s snobby. It’s the reaction of a reader who’s read a not. (Snobby, at least for me, comes in informing others that their taste is crap if they like [insert title or genre here].
Well, if you’re a snobby sophisicate, you’re not alone.
What would you call something like Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, or Sam Shepard’s Mad Dog Blues, both of which include real or fictional characters meeting in unlikely (not to say bizarre) circumstances? Camino includes Kilroy, Caspar Gutman (from The Maltese Falcon), Don Quixote, Sancho, Esmeralda (from The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Lord Byron (frothing at the mouth about the beating heart of Shelley, if I recall correctly), and Marguerite Gautier (from La Dame aux Camillias). The play gets a lot of its impact from the fact that these are characters we know, all of whom are familiar…but losing ground in their hold on popular imagination; it wouldn’t be the same without the characters and their associations. Mad Dog Blues includes characters ranging from Marlene Dietrich and Mae West to Paul Bunyan and Captain Kidd (Mad Dog is like the love child of Camino Real and Kerouac’s On the Road). Again, it uses the characters, or the author’s idea of the characters, to evoke certain feelings–to jumpstart the conversation.
These come under the umbrella as transformative, I think, at least, the way I understand the term–in dialogue with.
That makes me wonder if someone could do the same with, say, Hermione Granger, as Asakiyume suggested above. Would lawyers be flung right and left if someone wrote a hip novel where Hermione goes back in time and talks sense into Yossarian of Catch-22, and magically makes Don Quixote’s visions real, or scolds Cato about his language? Maybe Rowling would stay the power of the law if Steven Sondheim did it–or maybe their teams of lawyers would do the Dance of Thousands of Billable Hours and negotiate a treaty first.
Once ran a story through a critique group and a truly dedicated critiquer tracked down Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and was able to confirm that a problem was that it did not slither in enough about the play for people who hadn’t read it to fathom the story.
I steal. I steal all the time. I note that conscious stealing has this advantage — you know that you are doing it, so you can set out scrubbing off as much as you can, down to what you really want to steal. It improves with practice. And the ideal idea to steal is when you are boiling with rage at the stupid, pointless waste of a really great idea.
(My notions on transforming such an idea are here because they are entirely too long to post here.)
The ideas that some other writer wasted are definitely the ideal ones to steal.
I once stole a character whom I liked a lot and whom the person who created him wasted in a senseless death. Of course, I changed his name and job and worldbuilding details and probably no one but me would know the original inspiration, but I still felt vaguely guilty about it. But then I told myself, “Hey, it’s not as if the original writer did anything with all the potential that character had. In fact, he threw the character and potential away, so why shouldn’t I use it?”
You’re rescuing the character from a criminal misuse.
That’s how we got Ents and Eowyn facing down the Lord of the Nazgul, after all! (Tolkien thought that Shakespeare blew TWO really good ideas in Macbeth by coming up with mundane answers to the Witches’ prophecies.)
Heh!
I’d address this on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think you can draw up rules without seeing the source material and the outcome – one person’s ‘too close to the text’ is another person’s clever pastiche. For some readers, a book might riff off the original in the best possible manner, and provide new twists, and make them think about the text – while other readers feel it’s clicheed, retreading old ground, and not bringing anything new to the table.
And then there’s the question of conscious and unconscious borrowing – someone who sets out to write (as Pat Wrede suggested, elsenet) the story of George Wickham and Lydia Bennet, their love affair and how they overcome their challenges *will* know what they’re doing and will read the original text; but other writers might react to texts without being aware they are doing it.
I’ve seen starting writers scare themselves out of writing because they’re too worried if X has been done before, particulary when they’re wrapped up coming up with a “new” concept. I tell these people the concept matters less than the execution. Anyone can take a well worn idea and make it fresh again if they bring their personal experience into the writing.
We all absorb stories. The subconscious alters them into something that resonates inside each person differently. We can’t get away from it. Our personalities form through stories, the ones we hear, and the ones we make up to explain our lives. A good writer takes those stories and builds something unique and personal from them.
I have noticed (inexperienced) writers who want to recapture the magic they felt reading something else, and end up coming up with something derivative because they’re too unsure of themselves to change the formula. They haven’t found their voice yet, don’t even know about “voice,” when it’s the one thing truly unique about the stories they have to tell.
A good point about voice!
About the unconscious stealing, it has frequently happened to me that I reread a book or rewatch a film or TV show I haven’t read/seen in twenty years or more and suddenly find myself face to face with a character or plot element from one of my own stories, an element I could have sworn I came up with all by myself.
It’s even more freaky when you run into a character or plot element from your own work in the work by some other writer you know you never read. For example, I recently read an SF novel from the mid 1990s, which featured a villain who was eerily similar to a villain from a space opera saga I wrote as a teen. Now I know that I had never read the book or the author in question, never mind that my character predates that book by several years. And since it’s impossible that the other author somehow managed to borrow an idea from a handscribbled and never published manuscript by a 16-year-old German girl, I have to conclude that we both borrowed that villain from the same third party source. But unfortunately, I have zero idea what that source might have been. I even tried asking my parents and friends from way back when whether they remember a character like that from any book, film or TV show from the 1980s, but their memory of story details isn’t very good.
Some things do float around the Zeitgeist.
Unconscious stealing is impossible to avoid–and frankly, I think it’s a good phenomenon. Writers build on what has come before while also trying to push forward. A good writer needs a foundation of ideas to mix and match new combinations and find relevant pieces that have been left unexplored. I know that my writing largely combines my personal influences into something that I hope is both interesting and entertaining. (These influences being 19th century continental fiction, science fiction, and experimentalism.)
I simply don’t think a writer can get very far without reading a lot, and that leads to stealing (at least, unconscious stealing).
An important point, that writers do need to read a lot. And that means writers will engage with what they read. Some of the greatest works of literature are in direct conversation with other works.
One of the interesting things to me about childhood influences, is that whatever you encounter is likely to be formative. Robin Hood myths were right up there with The Neverending Story for me. The lexicon of tropes and literary devices we acquire depends so much on when we encounter them!
For example, I first really engaged with Beauty and the Beast through Robin McKinley’s “Beauty”, and so in a way all retellings are perceived against that novel, though I intellectually know neither that nor the Disney movie are the original story. To me, Beauty is a bookish girl (whether a tomboy scholar, or a more standard-issue bookworm), and so turning her into, say, a true socialite with motives for going to the castle, is a fresh idea.
When I watched Buffy a couple of years back, it was interesting to see so much of what is now genre-standard to urban fantasy is presented in it, as if fresh. (I don’t know what level of originality it had, just the wide-spread influence, since it was so well-known.)
Both book and film series have had tremendous influence.
Buffy and Angel actually borrow heavily from other sources, but they combined the ideas they borrowed in a novel way that appealed to a certain group of people. And a lot of those people happened to be writers, so the ideas found in Buffy and Angel continue to percolate through culture.
Did you see that McKinley went and wrote Beauty & the Beast again? How did you like the reworked book?
She actually rewrote that story in several forms!
Just for the record? I’m linking to this terrific entry and group of comments from my class blog in two weeks. Great stuff here.
[Is that stealing, linking to this for my content? Well, only if you squint!]
Hah!