Writers: How do you deal with accusations of, "You stole my idea!"

[mckitterick]

Today I've been dealing with a guy who feels I used his idea for a recently published story of mine. (Just to be clear: I didn't.) Anyhow, it seems that this guy has a similar setup for a novel he's been working on, and someone who read his novel and heard about my story wrote to him to say it looked suspicious, and the third-party guy thought I had this similar-story-guy in my summer SF Writing Workshop (I didn't - he was in Kij's Novel Writing Workshop, so I never saw the book, outline, or any of that).

So I wrote to the similar-story-guy to clear things up, and now it appears that he thinks I'm a liar and a thief.

Egad, Charlie Brown.

He went from accusatory and "shocked" at my taking his idea to passive-aggressive a-hole during the course of the conversation. I feel I could have handled this better, but at least I did delete such phrases as, "your Machiavellian little mind" before sending the messages. Ahem.

As I publish more and teach more writers, I expect this kind of situation will come up more frequently. I imagine that John Scalzi hears from half a dozen writers every day with similar accusations.

Writers: Have you had to deal with such situations? If so, how did you handle it? I'd like to be the paragon of gentlemanly and instructive without telling the accusor to piss off.

Thanks,
Chris

Comments

[m-danson.livejournal.com]

I'm going to weigh in with a different perspective.

To me, what you've described looks like a perfectly normal conflict where both parties have had something that matters to them threatened and they are fighting back to protect what matters to them.

It sucks to feel accused. It sucks to feel robbed. It just sucks, and when things suck it's hard not to react. We bring our worst selves to the table when we fight. From the sound of it you would like to bring your best self to the table.

You can do that.

Consider what you want to get out of this situation and then consider your options.

Ignoring the accusation is an option.
Lawyers are an option.
Responding, in any manner, is an option.
Writing a blog post about it is an option.

If you don't want to ignore it and you want to have a productive interaction, then ozarque has quite a few entries on verbal self-defense that might be useful.

There are also quite a few resources for dealing with conflict [1] [2]** which may be useful in figuring out how to approach and think about the situation.

**Not a difinitive or complete list. I don't have my bookshelf here at the moment.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

This is terrific advice, thanks. A lot of what I'm looking for with this post is advice on how to deal with this kind of situation without making things worse.

[m-danson.livejournal.com]

A piece of advice (which works well when I remember to use it) my father gave me about dealing with people when I'm defensive:

"Don't explain. Don't justify."

They aren't going to listen. You'll come off looking defensive (cause you are) and defensiveness tends to escalate conflict.

Instead of explaining to them exactly how they are wrong with graphs and marching bands, you could try just letting them be wrong.

I'm going to pull this next bit out of my ass. Since you want to be a paragon of gentlemanly and instructive without telling your accusor to piss off, I'd suggest something like this:
----
Hi Mr.Accusor:

I recieved your email. Congratulations on completing your manuscript.

I was not aware of your manuscript, or any similarities to my short story, prior to your email.

Good luck in your writing career.

CM
---

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. Any writer who is also a reasonable person is already perfectly aware that ideas are cheap (with rare exceptions), and that execution of the ideas is what matters. If they're on the attack over a perception that an idea was stolen, they're not likely to respond well to reason on that matter. As you say, they're not going to listen to explanations.