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

[tmseay.livejournal.com]

You may not even remember this, Chris, but I actually did steal an idea from you once. Sort of. We were at ICFA when you mentioned a half-developed thought about a story that you either wanted to write or had written. About a year later I had an idea for a story and wrote it, and about six months after that I realized that my story had clearly been sparked, in the back of my mind, by the idea you'd described.

So I told you, and your response, as I recall, was pretty much, "Oh, you went a completely different direction than I would have anyway."

Which I mention for two reasons: first, because although you may not know how to respond to an accusation that you stole someone else's idea, you provided an excellent model of how to react to the news that someone stole your idea. And second... you know what? Our stories really did go in totally different directions. Nothing really in common except an initial germ. It was a great notion, but I could just as easily have "stolen" an idea from any book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble and developed it in a different direction and nobody ever would have noticed or minded. Holly Lisle once shared some interesting thoughts along these lines: http://hollylisle.com/how-to-legally-and-ethically-steal-ideas/.

Broad point being, I think that, except in cases of outright plagiarism, even "stealing ideas" is a perfectly common part of writing, especially in a genre where each work is in dialogue with every other work. What, does anyone think that Spiderman is a totally original story? (And of course you didn't steal any ideas to begin with!)

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Those are really good points, Thomas: Plagiarism is a much different animal than "idea theft," and ideas are only seeds that grow under the care we provide.

Thanks for the blog link - good stuff, there!

Great seeing you, by the way. Every so often, in the middle of a wonderful conversation, I wish I could text you to teleport in to join us.