In The Triumph of Saint Katherine, there’s a character called Rue.
She’s Repentia, and, as a part of her Penance, she laid down her name and took up a suitably humble moniker, which she carried to her final objective. And, inevitably, I had a couple of reviewers grumble that I’d obviously nicked the name from The Hunger Games.
Might be an age thing, but I’ve never read The Hunger Games (or watched it), and can say, hand on heart, that I used the word because of its meaning and connotation (duh). I didn’t nick it, and had I realised its alternative context, would have found something else.
A little thing, but indicative of a larger problem: what do you do if and when it looks like you’ve stolen something?
Well, the answer is simple: you do nothing. These things happen, people make assumptions (they’ve seen the thing, so you must’ve done), and you leave them alone.
It can, though, get a lot more complicated.
Going back to my interim project, the thing I started in 2017 and finished in the Summer of last year, it now looks very derivative of something else. Something recent, something fantasy genre, and something with an extremely high profile indeed. And it’s something I’ve absolutely read/seen before, as I’ve talked about it.
Yesterday, this realisation knocked the wind out of me. I was about ready throw both a paddy and the towel in… but I’m buggered if I’m wasting six years of work, a hundred and twenty thousand words, and all the love and energy that I’ve poured into the manuscript.
But what do you really do about these things? It’s all very well to say ‘ignore it’, but can you stop people assuming that you’ve just copied the thing?
I don’t think you can, but some thoughts:
Academic Christopher Brooker states that there are only seven plots: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. And, if you shift this sideways into the classic fantasy genre, you’ll find find yourself slap up against the JRRT problem, where so much has been derivative of LOTR. Expand that into multiple appropriations of various early mythologies, and into fifty years of D&D making some threads and themes very commonplace indeed, and it’s genuinely difficult to come up with something truly, personally unique. It’s all been done before.
(For the moment, I’m leaving aside industry and marketing trends, because that’s a whole separate discussion. This is about writing and ideas, not getting published).
But you can still make something yours, you can still feel like something is yours. Threads from one of those plots can and will feed into any of the others, creating something else, and you can set them against any background you like. And the same goes for the backgrounds themselves. You can take concepts from all your sub/genre/s, from LOTR and classic fantasy, from mythology, through grimdark, and all the way up to modern romantasy and ‘cosy’ SF, and blend them into something that has your mark on it.
All these things have fed (into) one another, and over years and decades. Multiple riffs and melodies have constantly played out from these essential first lines. Verisimilitude is inevitable, and some things your readers will recognise, but hey, that’s what genre’s about.
Going back to the interim project, I’ve talked myself in off the ledge and hope to get it online this Summer. And I hope that, when you read it, you remember that its work pre-dated the thing that it now resembles. And I hope your likewise remember that similar ideas can and will develop in isolation, when they’re fed by similar things.
Like Rue’s name, they just fit.
Above all, though, I hope you remember that what’s original is not the concept, or the plot, or the setting. What’s original, and what makes it yours, is your voice, and what you choose to say with it.
After all, no-one else is you.
Reading: Just starting Empire Falling by Robbie MacNiven. Thoroughly enjoying all the Twilight Imperium stuff, it’s much lighter hearted than WH, and the various characters and peoples are genuinely fascinating.
Watching: Finished the Three Body Problem, which was honestly a real let down, and after such an electric beginning. I understand it was very different to the book, but there were some serious plot issues with the Staircase Project and cop-outs for days. Hanging endings (as anyone who watched the last series of Angel will know) are really not the thing.
Fallout, though, is fucking epic.
Playing: Back to our Cormyr D&D today, and to our now grown-up characters. Funny how, if you’ve had a character in game-time for several years and watched them develop from first level, they’ll take on a personality completely of their own.