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]

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.