You got that from…
When I attended GMXv3 last October something horrible happened. No, the convention was not horrible – it was amazing. Something that happened there was horrible: when I was in the dealer’s room I saw a t-shirt with the slogan “Winter is coming” emblazoned across the front. I was both excited & confused, then quite worried, because it’s a big theme/tagline in my War of Seasons novels.
I knew my books weren’t anywhere close enough to warrant seeing random shirts popping up at vendor’s booths yet, so I had a very sinking feeling that this same line was big in another series…
Well, come to find out, it’s a huge theme/tag line in the George R.R. Martin, Game of Throne books. In fact, I’ve been seeing t-shirts all over the place with it now.
I’ve never read the Game of Throne series (or watched the show, which came well after I’d written my first WotS novel), so I obviously didn’t copy the line. In fact, I thought I was being a bit clever when I wrote it, “Winter is coming,” and that it was a good foreboding line in my books (key to the overall plot of the 3 books). Unfortunately for me, several years ago George R. R. Martin thought the same thing (granted Winter is both a different type of “thing” in our books and poses a different “threat”).
So my question was this: Do I remove the line from my forthcoming books (it’s already in The Human, released June 2011) and instead use something that sounds not nearly as good (like “winter approaches”)? Or do I leave it in, and if people want to think I copied Game of Thrones they can?
I’ve found that people already tell me after reading my books “Oh, you got that part from Lord of the rings” or “You got that part from Harry Potter,” which if it seems that way, I can say it was never done purposely. I scour my books for “lifts” or anything that sounds too much like something else (i.e., I really wanted a faerie character of mine to sparkle, but due to a certain popular series with another sparkly main character, I felt quite constrained) and when I come across them, I excise them. Here’s the thing – there are no new stories out there – it’s all how we tell them. No matter what I do, something I write will strike someone else as “from Narnia” or “from OZ.”
So I wondered if it was worth removing the line? It worked really well, and I really liked it, a lot. I polled a couple friends of mine for their advice, especially in that they’d been writing/published for decades now.
I was essentially told that there will always be a set of readers that simply don’t understand the creative process and that parallel stories/ideas happen all the time. That those readers will constantly assume that they know where you got your ideas from or flat out accuse you of “copying” or “lifting” an idea. They both related stories of coming up with stories for novels & realizing that friends of theirs who write in the same genre had come up with almost the same story – parallel ideas do happen all the time. I was then told to get use to it, that from the moment I published my first story “you got that from” would become a part of my life.
Ultimately they both told me not to fret over it, and gave me some suggestions of how to deal with the problem.
So what did I decide? It’s too late to change The Human, nor do I wish to (“Winter is coming” is only in there once), but I ended up giving each race in my book a different way of saying “Winter is coming” specific to their culture – “Winter is nearing, Winter approaches, etc.” Not as powerful, but it works, and is uniquely mine.
Heh.
who am I kidding? Probably not – but at least it’s not “Winter is coming.” 😉
*****
My apologies for being so quiet online – I have been busy working on Book 2, and of course, the holidays…
At any rate, here are a couple links of interviews and podcasts I’ve been on over the last several months:
My very first interview ever from Origins 2011
Mormonism in Sci-Fi panel at Dragon*Con 2011
And a couple great links to other blogs and posts that I enjoyed & found quite helpful:
1,000 books sold, success in indie publishing