RTW #116: Stolen Ideas, and Why They're Okay

This is a post for YA Highway's Road Trip Wednesday. I am posting it late because I am a lazy ass and didn't get out of bed until *mumble* o'clock this afternoon. However, there's still time: if you're interested in the topic and want to have your own say, then write your own post and post the results here.

This Week's Topic:

What SNI [shiny new idea] were you psyched to work on, but discovered it was too close to something already done?

Let me start with a story: When I was in middle school, I fell in love with Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. If you don't know them-- and you should!-- they're a delightful quartet of YA novels set in and around the mythical Enchanted Forest. They're full of fractured fairy tales, but the characters are smart and sympathetic and have real, perilous adventures-- and, also, they teach you that you can melt a wizard in soapy water with a little bit of lemon juice.



In the last book, Talking to Dragons, the heroes encounter a simulacrum. In Wrede's story, a simulacrum is a sort of magic mannequin that imitates a motionless human body. In Talking to Dragons, one is used to distract the heroes from the real hiding place of a person they're seeking (is that vague enough not to be a spoiler?). I thought that was a cool ideas, and didn't know that the word also has other meanings.

When I was in high school, therefore, it showed up in a story I wanted to write. The idea was that the two heroines-- students at a magic magnet school hidden among the real high schools of American suburbia-- would discover a blank simulacrum in a closet at their school. They would recognize it immediately for what it was, because unenchanted and without set features it would lack any semblance of real life. Later, while they were still puzzling over that mystery, a teacher at their school was to be found dead in his classroom. The mystery of his death would take up the rest of the novel-- until it was discovered that he wasn't dead after all, and had just faked his demise using the empty simulacrum from the closet.

I thought it was a pretty cool story, and was really looking forward to writing it. I'd gotten a few pages into it-- had described the girls' magical school notebooks, which would change their lettering from "School of Math" to "School of Magic" depending on who was looking at them. The school was to be, in most ways, very much like the high school I actually attended-- cinderblock walls, white tile corridors, ordinary classrooms, rows and rows of lockers. The students and their parents would know that they really went there to study magic, but everyone else would think they were only ordinary students.

I'm sure you can see the problem here.

I'd just started writing this opus when a friend of mine introduced me to a series she thought I'd really like. And she was right: I loved them.

As did everyone else.

The Harry Potter books had just started to pick up speed in the US. The third book was out, and was getting positive reviews in the magazines, but there hadn't yet been the explosion of popularity that was to indelibly change global pop culture for the foreseeable future. They were just books-- cute, fun books about a boy who went to a magic school in a magical world that was hidden right alongside the normal one. I knew that my "magic high school" was different-- and I knew that dedicated readers would know that, too. I also knew, however, that it would be impossible to get the book out there-- if it was ever published at all-- without being seen as derivative.

This was before I realized that Hogwarts itself was far from the first "magic school" ever written about. In fact, the Harry Potter books resemble The Worst Witch much more closely than my little school would have resembled Harry Potter. It wasn't the degree of resemblance that mattered, however, as much as the success of the Harry Potter franchise. Plenty of people have never heard of Miss Cackle's Academy, but very few (among the American reading public, at least) have never heard of Hogwarts.

However, I kind of regret the fact that I didn't write the story anyway. It did have potential-- I think it would have been a really fun little mystery. Sophomoric, of course-- I was a high school senior at the time, and I know what my writing was like when I was seventeen. But I can't imagine the difference a finished manuscript would have made to my confidence back then, and to my progress as a writer on the whole. IN a way, I did revisit the story eventually, in a very different form. SNOWBERRY, my NaNo project from two or three years ago, was set at an odd little magnet school where lots of people had "special talents" that weren't known to the general public. There may or may not have been actual magic classes, and there certainly wasn't complex worldbuilding on the level of Hogwarts, but there were two plucky heroines sneaking around and looking into closets they should have stayed out of. (I may actually re-write SNOWBERRY after I finish my current project; I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do next.) But I still think about that simulacrum, and wonder how the mystery would have turned out.

I've come to believe that the really derivative works of fiction-- the ones everyone knows are take-offs of earlier, more successful works-- are written by authors who read too narrowly. If your story is about vampires and werewolves, that's fine. If your story is about vampires and werewolves and brings nothing new to the table, however-- whether in terms of character development, or worldbuilding, or whatever else-- then you probably need to get out of your chosen genre and read some other things. Think of it like a gene pool: if everyone is directly descended from the same few works, with no influences from other genres or time periods, then the stories are going to start looking oddly same-ish and developing unfortunate structural weaknesses: literary inbreeding, in other words. And no one wants that.

The moral of the story here-- for me, at least-- is that if you have a great idea, and it bears some resemblances to ideas you've already seen in print? Go ahead and write it anyway. If your literary influences are broad enough, they're almost certain to be different from the original author's-- and that means your writing is different, too, and the story you produce will not be the same as theirs. Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings are, in certain ways, the same story-- but that doesn't mean you should eschew reading books about plucky young lads and lasses called to great adventure and future glory because the story's already been told. Harry Potter is basically a Cinderella character in the first book-- plucky, deserving orphan with abusive relatives, raised from rags to riches and from ignominy to fame-- but that doesn't mean you should skip Harry Potter because you've already read Cinderella. I realized yesterday that in certain key areas my current story is actually a dark mirror of Twilight (but not in the main story arc, and I'm not telling you any more than that), even though I've never read the Twilight books before.

The point is that if a story gets deeply enough into the cultural membrane, it will "infect" everything else that's written for awhile-- and that's fine. As long as you're reading broadly and have multiple literary influences, then there's no reason to give up on a great idea just because someone's already tried it before. At worst, you'll add a new take to a story people are already enjoying-- and at best, you'll take the literature in a whole new direction, to the point where you're one day the person everyone is imitating.

At least, that's what I currently believe, and strongly hope is true.

What are your thoughts?

XOXO,

Kate