Ask A Seasoned Semi-Pro: Copycats!

New weekly feature! Like most people, I have more opinions than experience. Nonetheless, I have made every mistake possible, and a few previously thought to be impossible. I’m available to share my knowledge, my failings, and my deductions. Here’s Ask A Seasoned Semi-Pro!

Q: What happens when you find out your story is the same as someone else’s? Or when you realize you’ve been too inspired? Or the flip side: When you suspect someone else may be inspired by you?

I’ve written a fair amount on here about making yourself start things, knowing when to finish them, and how to keep going in between. Those are all things that are in your control. But what about things that aren’t? Suppose, for instance, you’re chugging along, you’ve got a great idea, you’re Doing The Work. And then one day, you’re explaining your project to a friend, and they say, “Oh, that sounds just like _____!” After you’re done punching your friend into a bloody sleep, you may feel a variety of things: helplessness, anger, failure. You may want to abandon your project. Don’t.

The first thing to do is step back from your panic. Go get a coffee, for like a week. Then look at your project again. How similar is it to this other thing? Is it truly EXACTLY like the thing that’s already made? Or is it just along the same lines? Big difference there. Let’s use a piece of fiction as an example. Is your novel about an electrical lineman in Indiana who has an encounter with a group of UFOs and becomes obsessed with finding them again, to the point where he’s ignoring his family and creating facsimiles of a strange mesa out of mashed potatoes? Then you have written Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, if your novel is about a guy who has an encounter with a UFO and becomes obsessed with finding it again, then that is not necessarily Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is merely along the same lines. Meaning: It has a possible future. You have some control here. This is only a good thing.

What about if you’re working on something and you’re suddenly frozen with the realization that you’ve accidentally been inspired by something else? Like, too inspired. Like, to a degree that could inspire litigation? Here you have a choice: 1) confront the issue head-on in the work itself; or 2) change what you’re doing, because it’s already been done.

What do I mean “confront the issue head-on in the work itself”? Well, if your work owes a heavy debt to someone else’s, acknowledge it. This is how homage is made, versus rip-off, and homage is a much nicer term, isn’t it? Let’s say you’ve realized, in draft two of your novel about a pool hustler who gets his hands broken, that the idea came to you after walking by the DVD of The Hustler at the library. (You were just there to pay late fines on Timecop.) And while your story’s not exactly like The Hustler, it’s close enough to make you feel like a fraud. If you were to re-craft your work so that there were, say, references to The Hustler, or some other device that gave your work a connection to The Hustler, then it would no longer be a rip-off, it would be an homage, or a “take” on The Hustler. (Note: Plenty of people start with this process. Case in point, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which is a “take” on King Lear.)

Now: If you don’t want to go the homage route, then you need to change your work. Perhaps drastically. This is actually my preferred route, and I’ll explain why after I get to the other cases of copycat-ism.

What if you know the person you’ve inadvertently borrowed from? Three years ago, I was working on the story that would become “Failure to Thrive,” which you can find in my award-winning fiction collection The Book of Right and Wrong. It was the last story written for the manuscript I was about to send out to vie for various short-story awards. This story had begun years earlier as an entirely different story about a mother with two grown sons, one an angry meth addict and one a depressed divorcee who’d come to live back at home. The story had never worked for me, and I put it away for a long, long time. When I remembered it and reread it, I discovered the problem: The mother. She had nothing going on besides being at home, waiting for her sons to clash, wondering when things might come to a head. These are some mighty passive verbs. So I began to think about what the mother might have going on. Turned out, she was a social worker who was maybe a little righteous, a little pushy in her job — yet she had this situation at home. (I also turned the non-addict son into a cop.) My mother-in-law is a social worker (and that’s where the parallels end), so I drew on situations I’d heard from her over the years. So far, so good. I ended up having the main character place a pair of young, abused black kids with a white foster family, one which eventually wanted to adopt the kids. Still no problem. Then I wanted a parallel between the character’s rage-filled, meth-head son and one of the foster kids, so I invented Twon, who was a sweet kid clearly riding the edge between happiness and psychosis. Twon worked, and I shaped him from kids I’d met as well as kids I’d heard about from my mother-in-law. (His story of abuse, if you’ve read the piece, actually happened to a young girl, one who never lived long enough to go to a foster home.)

It wasn’t until I’d finished this first new draft that it hit me: Twon was definitely inspired by something I’d read — and not the work of a stranger, either. A year earlier, I’d been at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where a workshop-mate and friend named Chad Simpson had brought in a story about a young couple with a foster child who is clearly riding the edge between happiness and psychosis. I was immediately sick with guilt and shame.

I emailed Chad that morning, explaining the situation and vowing to change the story if he wished. I really felt terrible, and I also felt like a hack and a fraud. Chad, for his part, was kind. He said it sounded like the situations were different enough: for one thing, the couple in his story were black, and the foster situation was the “A” story (in mine, it was the “B” story); for another, the dad in Chad’s story had an obsession with finding his foster son’s birth mother. Chad then related his own copycat story, where he’d discovered that a former writing teacher had “borrowed” a VERY distinctive act from a story Chad had workshopped with him. The teacher ended up winning a cash prize for his story, and went on to win a fairly major writing award. “My wife still calls him a thief,” said Chad, “but I’m over it.” He very kindly blessed my use of the borderline-psychotic foster kid. Besides being a good person, Chad is a phenomenal writer, and you should check him out here.

I don’t know if you’d always need to talk to someone about possibly being “too inspired” by them, but my feeling is, if it’s occurred to you and it bothers you, it’s worth broaching. At the very least, you’ll feel better. At best, you’ll have headed off what might have been a good spell of future resentment when the other person finally sees what you’ve done.

What about when you suspect someone has borrowed or been inspired by your work? Here’s where it’s entirely your call. You need to really look at both works and decide just how much has truly been borrowed versus you and that writer may have similar obsessions and you’ve both arrived at similar stories or situations through which to voice those obsessions. And ask yourself: Am I making too much of this? Is it really damaging to me or to others?

If you’re going to pursue Literary Justice, I think directness is the best policy here. Don’t talk behind the other person’s back. Go directly to them and say, “This might sound crazy, but I feel like the scene where your cabbie wades into the ocean with a tire rim chained around his neck is really similar to my scene where the stock-car driver wades into the ocean with a tire rim chained around his neck.” And then you can have, hopefully, an honest discussion. The other person may be embarrassed, or they may deny it, or they may completely cop to it. It’s up to you how much you want to proceed from there. Just keep in mind that inspiration is a funny thing, and that you might be in for an unpleasant surprise if someone were to take an inventory of all your scenes and match them against works you may or may not be familiar with.

(Note: Copycatting is hardly subjective, by the way, except when it is. Carlos Mencia performing a 20-minute Bill Cosby routine nearly word-for-word? No one can argue that this is not stealing, and possibly a little sociopathic. Louis CK and Dane Cook both performing a similar joke about itchy butts? There’s some gray there.)

I mentioned changing your work in the face of its similarity to others’. Chad was nice enough to send me a copy of the story I’d borrowed from, and while it put me at ease about the amount of inspiration I’d taken, it also made me want to make the differences even bigger. I gave Twon, my foster-kid character, more dialogue than in the first draft, and this ended up making the character that much richer than what I’d had anyway. I also gave him an upsetting scene involving some birdhouses, and this ended up creating a turning point the story had been missing entirely. The birdhouse scene, by the way, I stole outright from another source — my graduation speech at Bennington.

The worst thing to do is feel shut down or ruined by the realization of similarities between your work and others’. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a writer is shut some doors, rope off some perimeters. This is when imagination suddenly says, “Fine, we can’t get out that way? We’ll tunnel DOWN.” And suddenly new possibilities appear. Consciousness of the similarities will guide your hand, if you let it, and you may find yourself with an even greater sense of direction and purpose as you try and write the great UFO-obsession story that’s NOT Close Encounters.

Got a question? Need advice? Don’t have access to a full-time author? Ask a seasoned semi-pro!