Louis R wrote:Even when it actually happens, which as you say is less often than it looks, borrowing is _not_ plagiarism. The only reason to toss a story because someone 'got there first' is if the market can only support the one version - and the evidence is solidly against that proposition!
When you develop a notion independently, you invariably give it a unique feel and background that readers pick up on. Which can lead to unseemly squabbles of the 'X did it first! Yeah, but Y is much more believable!' sort, but that's not always a bad thing. When you do borrow, more often that not it's to go in a direction that the originator _didn't_ go, either as a what if? or because it simply seems like the thing to do. David Brin, for example, most certainly didn't invent the notion of uplift, but he's gone ahead and created a unique and interesting universe out of it. And that's how notions become tropes.
C. O. Thompson wrote:< snip >
By remarkable coincidence, the attack mode I had alluded to on an other post is the same that O Scott Card used in Earth Awakens
I have had three well advanced storyboards come to a halt when I read the same idea in a well known authors recent work... OF course, I must be the one that plagiarized because they got it to the publisher first
But ideas pop up everywhere and from common knowledge of the underlying principles of physics or psychology, these ideas must have a similitude of structure
Louis,
Thank you for the insights... I believe that I agree with the core of your remark. Perhaps I should consider dusting off the old files, however; I cannot shake the thought that anyone reading them would not see the actual time I drafted them only how much they happen to be like something that someone well known wrote.
Still, I won't rule it out. One thing that is really nice about my situation is that I don't have to do what I don't want to do and another is that I have the time to do what I want so.
One of the stories I am working on now (that I have not seen anyone else use) requires mathematics that I know of but cannot perform
I am the kind of person who puts 2 and 2 together and comes up with 22 but I need to have accurate numbers for orbital mechanics that brings an asteroid across the orbit of Earth inbound and outbound in such a way that Earth gradually catches up to it for a phenomenal near hit that is only hours ahead of the moon in its orbit inbound and would have just cleared the moons orbit outbound if it had not collided with enough rocks in Mercury's L3 and changed its course.
See...
I know what I think would set the stage for the story I want to tell but, if the math were not right, it falls to the level of pulling a magic sword from the rock.
and that is not the way I wanted the story to go... I'd rather have two jugglers with chainsaws passing between each other OH and maybe a clown on a unicycle passing through the whole act at the same time