by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author

 “Are all your books rip offs?”

How does an author answer a question like that without sounding defensive? The question itself is intended to provoke, but getting upset won’t solve anything. Getting upset about it might even make the situation worse.

This is the question I got asked at a book event I attended a few weeks ago. I tell myself that the guy who asked it didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Honestly I was so stunned that I didn’t know how to respond at first.

Is it wrong to rip off (or steal) someone else’s book and claim it’s your own? Absolutely. That’s one of the biggest moral concerns with the use of A.I. in book writing. Theft. In the world of artistic expression, there are creatives and there are counterfeiters. If you take another artist’s work and promote it as though it is your own, you aren’t creative. You’re a fake and a thief.

But if that’s the case, how do we reconcile the stories that have been told, retold, and re-retold for centuries? When you boil a story down to its most basic components, every story is the same. Some experts believe that there are only two basic plots that exist in every story ever written—a story of internal change and a story of external change. If there are only two stories, then surely people have had to steal from each other in order to write more of them.

Plagiarism is a thing, don’t get me wrong. There are many instances where someone claiming to be an author tries to steal a story that doesn’t belong to them and get away with it. To be honest, I’ve always wondered why anybody tries to steal an author’s work; we don’t make as much money as people assume, and doing this as a career is way more difficult than people think.

But if you take an idea inspired by a book or show or movie and put a new, creative twist on it that comes from your own imagination, is it still plagiarism? Is it stealing when you’ve taken an idea or the concept of a character and adjusted it to be different?

That’s the difference between counterfeits and creatives.

[tweet_box design=”default” float=”none” inject=”#Writing #Writinglife #Writingtips”]Is Inspiration In Writing Actually Just Stealing? by @ACW_Author on @BRMCWC[/tweet_box]

A counterfeit takes what already exists and tries to pawn it off as their own creation. A creative is inspired by an existing work and turns it over and over in their minds and changes it to be something different than it was before (and then invests countless hours of actual work to write it).

There is truly nothing new under the sun, and that includes stories. Think about it.

James Cameron’s Avatar is a mix of Dances with Wolves and the animated movie Fern Gully. The original series of Star Trek was based on old school western shows. Stories like Harry Potter and Star Wars share the same structure as ancient epics like The Odyssey. Consider the classic Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, which was based on earlier tragic love stories, and compare it to West Side Story, which takes the same concept and sets it in 1950s New York gang culture.

I love superhero stories and space adventures. Within those genres, readers expect very specific elements to take place in the story. Superheroes have origin stories, found family, teamwork and roles, and usually a lot of humor and adventure. That’s what superhero stories are. But does that mean that my superhero books were stolen from someone else’s superhero books?

Of course not.

I have a space opera trilogy which I began writing in 2001. I first had the idea for it in my freshman year of college, and I started plotting and planning and developing characters. Somewhere along the way, a friend pointed out that my book was just like a television show called Firefly. So I watched Firefly and, actually yes, he was right. It was eerily similar in many ways, namely that it’s about a ragtag bounty hunter crew helping and protecting a mysterious girl with an unknown past.

But did I steal Firefly to write my space opera? Of course I didn’t. I had my first outline scribbled down before Fireflyeven released on television, let alone before I watched it for the first time in 2005. But the genre is the same. The reader expectations are the same. So when I talk about it, people make the connections.

This is a valuable tool for marketing. You can explain your stories to potential readers in terms of books, movies, or shows they might already be familiar with. In this instance, I can tell people that if they enjoyed Firefly, they’ll love my book. That doesn’t mean I plagiarized it. It means I wrote a space western.

You will always face critics and unhappy people no matter where you go, and those same critics won’t hesitate to poke and prod at you and your work, trying to diminish your accomplishments for whatever reason. Just know that embracing inspiration as you tell your stories isn’t wrong. Without inspiration, we’d be telling the same two stories over and over again with no variation.

Yes, write your own story. And if you take inspiration from another work, give them credit. It’s only fair. But don’t buy into the fear that says you can’t get ideas anywhere else but your own head. The only Person who can create anything out of absolutely nothing is God.

If you can clearly compare your story to other recognizable titles, you’ve got a built-in audience that you can connect with immediately. Don’t miss the value in that. And don’t let people who don’t understand discourage you.

It’s far easier to criticize than to do.

A.C. Williams is a coffee-drinking, sushi-eating, story-telling nerd who loves cats, country living, and all things Japanese. Author of more than 20 books, she keeps her fiction readers laughing with wildly imaginative adventures about samurai superheroes, clumsy church secretaries, and goofy malfunctioning androids; her non-fiction readers just laugh at her and the hysterical life experiences she’s survived. If that’s your cup of tea (or coffee), join the fun at www.amycwilliams.com.