Subconscious idea theft
What do you do when your brain is totally stuck on a great idea, but you’re afraid you’ve subconsciously stolen it from someone else?
I bought Tobias Buckell’s book Crystal Rain recently. The cover depicts people in flying blimplike wooden ships, swashbuckling fearlessly. I haven’t read it yet, as I’ve been working my way through Dave Marusek’s “Getting to Know You” first, but in the meantime my brain has been pondering the whole flying-ships thing, and has invented the basic underpinnings of a watery world with steampunk flying ships. It’s the sort of thing where as I’m drifting off to sleep, I’ll think “Hey, that’s how the ships fly,” or I’ll wake up and think “Ooh, I know where they can get an energy-rich fuel source for their steam engines!”
So I’m a little upset that this world my brain is busy thinking up in the background is going to turn out to be way too similar to the Crystal Rain world, and I’ll feel like I’m just ripping Buckell off if I actually write anything in it. What do I do? Forge ahead and hope it turns out different enough? Give up on it until I’ve read Crystal Rain, hoping that his world will turn out to be significantly different and mine will still be usable?
And if I do read Crystal Rain, I’m afraid I’ll end up wanting desperately to appropriate Buckell’s cool ideas into my own, thereby turning my work, effectively, into unpublishable fanfiction. I don’t want that to happen, since I want what I write to at least be something that an editor would consider buying, and fanfiction definitely doesn’t fall into that category.
Maybe I’ll give up and write a vampire story set in the future on a jungle planet, or something.
February 27th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
The funny thing with writing is that by the time you’re done your own voice, experience, and ideas will make it unrecognizable to anyone even if you are worried about this. Campbell used to give the same story idea to 10 different writers and get 10 fundamentally different stories back.
And anyway, more steampunk can only be a good thing :-)
February 28th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I guess the best thing to do is just go ahead and write, and if I’m not happy how it turns out, I can just chalk it up to experience and move on. But you’re right, I don’t have anything like the background you have, and as long as I try to keep my writing true to myself it’ll most likely turn out unique.
I was just feeling momentarily worried, but I suspect if I actually start working on this, things will sort themselves out. Thanks for the reassurance!
March 19th, 2007 at 12:41 am
That sounds like fun.
I just had a very heated conversation about how I was not stealing my flying ships from anyone.
Based on that I think you don’t have anything to worry about, flying ships aren’t completely mainstream so no matter what if the person has not read any of the other flying ship stuff they will think you are stealing.
My method is to start a notepad in my story file and write down anything I think I’ve ‘borrowed’. That way I can compare and change the ideas, also it gives you a sort of confessional feeling: since you have admitted it they can’t get you or some such.