I've been on vacation this past week, and in addition to packing up more books for Methuselah Foundation donors, attending my little sister's college graduation, visiting with a cousin from out of town, and doing various other things I don't normally have much time for, I've been working on a science fiction story.
My story presently consists mainly of a piece of graph paper on my desk covered in boxes indicating plot points, arrows, and scrawled notes in teeny-tiny text. I've also been making little cartoony versions of my story's characters in one of those ridiculous-yet-addictive online avatar-maker thingies (except in the case of the robot -- he's an original drawing). And I've been working out a lot of the details in my head as I've gone about my day.
Why am I writing about this? Well, mainly because I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm terribly excited, almost to the point where the whole thing is so shiny in my head that I can't even look at it face-forward.
However (and I would be very interested in getting some thoughts from anyone else who has written fiction, or attempted to do so), I keep running into one stumbling block that I am not sure how to deal with. I'm not going to let it stop me from writing, of course, but I am curious to know how others handle this kind of thing.
Basically, what's happening is that whenever I come up with a character or plot point, I keep finding all these ways the character or plot point resembles someone I actually know (or me, for that matter), or something that is actually happening in the real world.
Part of me feels kind of silly for being concerned about this. After all, reality is the only place I have to pull ideas from in the first place! And not only that, but despite the speculative and fanciful elements of the scenarios I'm writing about (sentient robots, teenage cyborgs, etc.), I want the story I write to be sufficiently grounded in the real world such that humans will actually be able to relate to it.
But still, I don't want to end up having someone read my story and think that I'm writing about them. I am most certainly not basing anyone in my story on an actual person I know IRL (in fact, I am quite deliberately trying to avoid doing this), but it's more than likely that some people are going to end up being at least partial "composites" of people I've met, known, heard of, etc. Heck, I don't even doubt that some of my fictional characters are going to end up having elements of other fictional characters!
I guess I'm wondering if there's some kind of "check" or test that would-be fiction writers can run their characters through in order to make sure they're "sufficiently original"? Is that kind of thing just a matter of getting good peer review, or what?
Just curious...
9 comments:
I'd say that the only difference between having conscious borrowings and original characters / themes is that in the original case, the borrowing happens somewhere so deep in your unconscious that you don't realize it.
Don't worry about it. A lot of published authors explictly base parts of their characters and events on real events (I wouldn't be surprised to hear if the majority did). Off-hand, I remember that at least Richard Adams (of Watership Down fame) based his characters on people he knew while in the military, and I've read writing guides advising you to do it. Also, when I was in elementary school, some-author-whose-name-I-forget visited us and said that he routinely went to cafes and restaurants to eavesdrop on people having conversations, in order to come up with new ideas for his novels.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Writers are always (consciously or unconsciously) basing characters of either themselves or others. I think part of this is that as one writes out a situation, one has an image in their head of that situation, and they are, of course, reacting to that image, and whether intentionally or not, their feelings and reactions to the scene at present, are somehow absorbed into the story within the writing.
The way I view it is as a way of describing some aspect of yourself that you may never have felt comfortable describing directly, and becomes somehow a part of the story you are writing. I usually write poetry, which is an undeniably ambiguous genre, but what short stories I have written tend towards the style of my poetry, being very based on the physical surroundings and the emotional aspects, while leaving the background or precise situation within which the story is written up to the reader to interpret.
In other words, basing characters on yourself or people you know is something that all writers do, regardless of their style, genre, or language. I say, go for it. And good luck with your story! I'm happy to hear you're having fun. I know a lot of people who think they want to write a particular kind of story, and bash themselves to smithereens for preferring to write a completely different genre of writing. It's very painful to watch XP
There is only so much room in the 'idea space' for characters, and you are bound to find similarities between your ideas and that of others.
That you are writing about robots and cyborgs gives you a bit more unexplored territory, but still you are likely to be able to find your ideas are similar to something else. That's how creativity works.
I'd say that as long as your main points, or important character personality aspects, haven't been done to death (once or twice is ok), then they are original. Whether they are interesting is another question again...
The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés
On a related note:
The Top 100 Things I'd Do
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord
Thanks, folks, for your comments.
As I mentioned to someone elsewhere, I am feeling kind of silly now about worrying about "copy characters"! I'm finding that the more I let a character run around in the Universe That Is My Brain, the more he or she tends to develop his or her own little quirks and likes and dislikes.
One thing I'm trying to do in this case that I think will help as far as characterization goes is *not* focus too much on writing narrative for the time being. Instead, I'm engaging in a kind of mental "world-building". Last night I also came up with (fictional) e-mail addresses for all the characters, too, and I'm planning on writing a series of imaginary e-mails from each of them so I can get a feel for the "voice" of each.
Oh, and I've also posed a bit of a challenge to myself that might very well be impossible, but that definitely seems to be helping me avoid cliches so far: write a story involving Cute Kids and Robots that JMS (of Babylon 5 fame) would not necessarily hate. :P Probably futile, but keeping the goal in mind at least has the potential to shift things away from Annoying Cliche-Land.
Oh, and Mark: Your link to the Evil Overlord list (which is indeed awesome) reminded me of this - if you haven't seen it already, you might enjoy the TV Tropes Wiki.
Some funny/interesting entries are: AI Is A Crapshoot, Genetic Engineering Is The New Nuke, Lego Genetics, and of course, Human Popsicle!
The James Randi organization has an associated forum. A couple years back someone started a thread on the nonsense that happens only in movies and not in the real world. I thought of three contributions: (1) Terrorists have offices in really cool night clubs. (2) Warrior women have more upper body strength and physical skill than the men they fight. (3) In historical movies, men armed with smooth bore, muzzle loading weapons can hit targets at improbable distances. They also seem able to reload them faster than you probably can in real life.
Regarding (3), in a cable TV version of a Horatio Hornblower novel, I saw Ioan Gruffudd shoot someone with a flintlock pistol at a range I've have trouble hitting with my .357 Magnum revolver.
Don't let anything stop you from writing! Don't let the worries over take your writing.
Your emailing idea in the comment section is quite interesting.
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