Okay, I need advice. What do you do when you come up with a really great story and you get really excited about it and then you watch or read something that happens to be really similar? Drive me nuts, it's happened three times. Once with a detective story, once with a romance and just recently with this really cute idea about a cyborg in high school. Then I went over to a friends house and we watched a movie about a android in high school!!!!! It even had some of my original jokes. Okay, they weren't exactly alike, but what do I do? I'll look dorky if someone connects them, and I really did think it was original. I don't want to make it too off course and have the cyborg going to school with aliens on a forbidden planet where all they eat is lima beans and lima beans happen to upset his hardware. (hey, that's not bad...)
So what do I do?
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6 comments:
In the fifteen years I spent working on "Corridor" I kept seeing TV and movies that people could have pointed the finger and shouted "YOU COPIED!" "ReBoot," "Monsters Inc." and "The Matrix," particularly stand out in my mind. Then I thought I would be original and write an epic fantasy adventure where the main character has the unusual magical gift of being able to hear the narrative, and someone comes out with "Stranger than Fiction."
Ideas are not created in a vacuum, and as the people my age who grew up watching and reading what I watched and read started creating fiction, they used a lot of the same elements I did.
On the other hand, take a simple idea like "an android who goes to high school" and you can do all sorts of different things with it. It is almost a sub-genre of science fiction: characters who look like normal people but act weird because they are aliens/androids/zombies/vampires/whatever. No one can do it the way YOU do it. Don't get discouraged if someone "beats" you to an idea. Your style, your voice, your message will be different, and that's what really counts.
But don't be trying to publish any books about orphan boys who find out they are wizards. . . Brandon already beat us to that with Alcatraz.
Ah, Rebecca, you make me laugh. As for having someone else come up with your idea, I heard an editor say once much the same that Rebecca said, with the added comment that it takes a long time to write a book and even longer to publish it. By the time your book is out on the shelf, the others may already be forgotten. On the other hand, my Entomological Tales Book One originally had Petronella's last name as Throckmorton and a sub-plot with Germany and Egypt in pre-WWI Europe. Imagine my horror when my editor said they wanted to buy my book, but the last name and the sub-plot were both in a book that they were already publishing and if I could change my book, we could sign a contract. Ouch! So, Petronella's last name became Arbuthnot and I learned a lot about outlining to find plot threads and character placement and did a lot of research on the Panamanian rebellion against Colombia in 1903. It actually worked better. So, I guess none of us is totally original, but if your voice is fresh, at least part of the story is clever enough, and you find just the right editor, you can publish your story anyway. Good luck!
I don't know if you attended Janette Rallison's breakout session on point of view, but she had everyone in the classroom rewrite the exact same conversation and it was AMAZING how different it was. With everyone using the same words. So I wouldn't worry about it. You'll do it differently, even if you have the same ideas.
The same thing happens to me a lot. Case in point... ever since 10th grade, I wanted to write a Frog Prince story. I started to work on it seriously a couple of years ago, only to learn that Disney is coming back to traditional animation by doing 'The Princess and the Frog' - I was very, very sad. :( People kept asking if it was based off of the movie. Which of course isn't out yet.
With my story, I think that I am going to store the ideas that I had away for later, and then write it for fun. It could still be published, I imagine, if it's different enough, and better in quality. So I guess we'll have to see.
Have lots of different ideas... and, as the others said, perspective plays a big part in making it original. :D
I am actually very delighted that two post-apocalyptic science fiction films for children will be coming out this year. It will get them all excited about reading my book . . . in two or three years . . . when they've forgotten all about it. . . gosh, how long does publishing take?
How long does publishing take? Depends on the publisher, but an average is 2-4 years after they initially say they are interested. If you're lucky, they sign a contract right off. If you are a newcomer, you're more likely to do a couple of revisions for them before they sign any contract.
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