So, a few
weeks ago I got to witness an all-too common event. The person whining about how “they stole my
idea!” Who they were isn’t
important. Sad truth is, it was a
nonsense claim, one we’ve all seen more than a few times.
Here’s an
ugly truth that all half-decent writers know.
Ideas are cheap. They’re cheap,
borderline worthless, because they’re common.
Ridiculously common. I can say
with absolute certainty that I have more ideas for books than I am ever going
to be able to write. Seriously, even if
I live to be a hundred, I’m pretty full up.
And know what? I’m going to have more ideas tomorrow. And the day
after that.
Not only
that, but a lot of time my ideas will line up with the ideas other people
have. This is called parallel creation,
and it happens a lot. Especially when
you consider how many folks come up with ideas they never do anything with.
Here’s an absolutely
true story. Throughout 2008 and 2009, I
placed in a few screenplay contests with a script I wrote called Reality
Check. It was about the crew of a
retro-style spaceship who slowly come to realize they’re actually characters in
a 1950s serial. Eventually, they figure out how to escape into the real
world—which turns out to be a far more terrifying and dangerous place than
they’re prepared to deal with. Especially when one of their mortal enemies
follows them through.
If this
sounds vaguely familiar, it should. It’s
got a lot of the same elements as John Scalzi’s Redshirts, a
ridiculously fun book that came out about two years after I won my last contest
with Reality Check (if memory serves, I got a free copy of Final Draft
for that one).
Now, I’m
sure some people would go nuts and start shrieking about plagiarism and lawsuits. Heck, I was dragged into a court case a few years back which was pretty clearly just weak parallel creation, but
someone decided to sue over it anyway.
And lost.
Simple
truth is, Scalzi and I have never met (I think we were rushed past each other
once at NYCC, but I’m not even sure of that). To the best of my knowledge he’s
never been a judge or reader for a screenwriting contest. I have absolutely no reason to think he ever
saw my story. We’re just two guys about
the same age with similar educations, backgrounds, and interests who
happened to look at something the same way and both decided to do something
with it. I wrote a screenplay, he wrote
a novel. That’s parallel creation.
There’s
also a funny rule of thumb I heard a while back that I think is, alas, horribly
true. The level of worry someone has
about their idea being stolen is usually an inverse ratio to how good that idea
actually is. In other words, people tend
to get really paranoid about their bad clichés and tropes being stolen. That court case I mentioned before? It was based off some ridiculously common clichés. I mean, embarrassingly common. I actually laughed out loud when the lawyer
told me they were part of the core basis of the lawsuit.
Y’see,
Timmy, we all have ideas. And the simple
truth is, there’s somebody out there with the same influences, the same
education, the same resources as me who’s having the same idea. Maybe even ten or twenty people.
Now, let me
bring up a related point to keep in mind about ideas. In fact, here’s another
story. Genders, genres, and other facts
have been changed (or maybe not) to protect the semi-innocent...
I was at a
convention a while back and one of the other attending authors offered me a
copy of her book. My to-read list is so
huge I generally don’t accept such offers, but she was insistent so I said
sure. And then it slowly worked its way
through my to-read pile until it was at the top.
Said book
was a fantasy novel that was aiming for a Game of Thrones-type
feel. It was very big on
swordfighting. Sword vs. sword, sword vs.
axe, sword vs. two swords, sword vs.
sword and a dagger...
It just
went on and on like this. Every fifth or
sixth page had a sword fight. Or a flashback to a sword fight. Or someone talking about what they were going
to do to someone else in an upcoming sword fight.
And every
battle ended bloody. No mercy in this
world. Everyone either loses a head or
an arm or gets impaled. Sometimes all three. Blood and guts sprayed
everywhere and got on everyone. House of a 1000 Corpses looked clean and sanitized compared to this book.
Needless to
say... it wasn’t that good. There were
several places where the book bordered on awful. I read about fifty pages and skimmed the
rest. More sword fights. More blood.
A few beatings. The non-stop action
wasn’t the only issue, alas, but it was the one that matters for today.
Y’see, some
of these battles were actually kind of clever.
They did things I hadn’t seen before in books or on screen. The way they
approached a character or their training.
Some of the ways the fights went.
How some of them were described.
But it’s
not enough just to be original. My book
needs to be coherent, both in plot and in structure. It needs to have flow. These are the things that tie my ideas together and turn them into a story.
I’ve
mentioned before that ideas are rarely more than plot points, and a pile of plot points is not the same thing as a plot.
No matter how clever my idea is, it’s not going to automatically make my
story into a good story. Especially
if... well, I don’t have a story. And an
idea without a story is...
Well, it’s
borderline worthless.
Next time, I’d like to put a
few thoughts on the block.
Until then... go write.
Until then... go write.
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