Where do you get your ideas from?
I was thinking about this as I walked the dogs today, mainly because I'd read it as a question in some writer interview and was wondering how I might answer it.
I get my ideas from the local idea shop. I like to buy the half-formed ideas, or the random selection of concepts bags that are set out on the counter. They're cheaper than full-blown scenarios and as long as you've got the right imaginary tools at home, you can soon hone them into something more useful. If you live near an ideas factory (which, sadly, I don't), you can sometimes guddle around in the bins at the back and pick up idea fragments for free. It's also worth making the acquaintance of any idea designers of idea-smiths you might meet, as they often hand out free samples.
What brought this lunacy on, you ask. Well, Sandra did (she tends to have that effect). Actually, that's not fair. But she did post a mention of the ongoing DaVinci Code vs Baigent and Leigh nonsense and raise the thorny question of just what is going on in the writing world.
From what I remember of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (and it was a long time ago that I read it), Baigent and Leigh claim it to be true. This is not a work of fiction, not an idea to be copyrighted or patented, but a truth uncovered by hard detective work and a little bit of imagination. To claim that Dan Brown stole their idea is surely to admit that it was never anything more than a complete fabrication in the first place. If I were to write a fictional story based on the life of Elizabeth I, would I be opening myself to being sued by every historian or biographer who has ever written about good Queen Bess? I don't think so.
In this instance, it's all about the money. Dan Brown has stacks of it, as do the makers of the film. Baigent and Leigh, despite having made a tidy sum out of the credulous with their own book (and increased that sum in recent times on the back of The DaVinci Code), have decided that they want a slice of a bigger pie. I suspect the only people who will make anything out of this is the lawyers.
A few years ago, Garth Ennis, one of the best comic book writers around at the moment, wrote a series for DC's Vertigo imprint called Preacher. The basic idea was of a mid-West American Preacher inadvertently acquiring the word of god, by which he could force people to do things. God meanwhile, went into hiding. One of the main forces for bad in the whole story was an outfit called The Grail, who were a secret society charged with ensuring the bloodline of Christ lived on. That whole arc of the story stemmed from the old Jesus and Mary Magdalene got married and had a daughter called Sarah idea, but Baigent and Leigh never tried to sue Garth Ennis, or DC, because Preacher was only successful amongst comics readers.
Interestingly, another example from the world of comics is Neil Gaiman's character Timothy Hunter, from The Books of Magic. Timothy is a young English boy with family issues (and a pet owl) who discovers that he's a wizard. The first mini-series of The Books of Magic came out in 1990, seven years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. When asked about it, Gaiman simply says that any similarities are superficial and coincidental. I suspect he would find the idea of suing JK Rowling as laughable (although others are not so accommodating).
Which brings us back to the ideas shop. It's a franchise, of course, and the stock all comes from the same design house and factories. Ideas are expensive, and the more fully-formed they are, the higher the price. A completely interwoven series of themes and concepts can cost several years, if not a lifetime. So there's a thriving market in secondhand ideas. In fact, some people try to say that there are only seven basic ideas, and all the rest are just rehashes of those old saws. Yet we take those scraps, used time and time again, and weave them into new clothes to try on, new fashions from the old. We reinvent and recombine and it's always ever so slightly different. And when we publish our ideas, they are devoured by our readers, ripped up into their tiny component pieces which end up, inevitably, back at the shop.
I'm not advocating plagiarism in any way. There's a big difference between using someone else's ideas to help form your own, and just using someone else's ideas, or words, wholesale. Copying without permission or acknowledgement is illegal, that's why we call it copyright. But when you take an idea and work it into something different from what came before, then you're no longer copying. You're creating something new.
I get my ideas from the local idea shop. I like to buy the half-formed ideas, or the random selection of concepts bags that are set out on the counter. They're cheaper than full-blown scenarios and as long as you've got the right imaginary tools at home, you can soon hone them into something more useful. If you live near an ideas factory (which, sadly, I don't), you can sometimes guddle around in the bins at the back and pick up idea fragments for free. It's also worth making the acquaintance of any idea designers of idea-smiths you might meet, as they often hand out free samples.
What brought this lunacy on, you ask. Well, Sandra did (she tends to have that effect). Actually, that's not fair. But she did post a mention of the ongoing DaVinci Code vs Baigent and Leigh nonsense and raise the thorny question of just what is going on in the writing world.
From what I remember of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (and it was a long time ago that I read it), Baigent and Leigh claim it to be true. This is not a work of fiction, not an idea to be copyrighted or patented, but a truth uncovered by hard detective work and a little bit of imagination. To claim that Dan Brown stole their idea is surely to admit that it was never anything more than a complete fabrication in the first place. If I were to write a fictional story based on the life of Elizabeth I, would I be opening myself to being sued by every historian or biographer who has ever written about good Queen Bess? I don't think so.
In this instance, it's all about the money. Dan Brown has stacks of it, as do the makers of the film. Baigent and Leigh, despite having made a tidy sum out of the credulous with their own book (and increased that sum in recent times on the back of The DaVinci Code), have decided that they want a slice of a bigger pie. I suspect the only people who will make anything out of this is the lawyers.
A few years ago, Garth Ennis, one of the best comic book writers around at the moment, wrote a series for DC's Vertigo imprint called Preacher. The basic idea was of a mid-West American Preacher inadvertently acquiring the word of god, by which he could force people to do things. God meanwhile, went into hiding. One of the main forces for bad in the whole story was an outfit called The Grail, who were a secret society charged with ensuring the bloodline of Christ lived on. That whole arc of the story stemmed from the old Jesus and Mary Magdalene got married and had a daughter called Sarah idea, but Baigent and Leigh never tried to sue Garth Ennis, or DC, because Preacher was only successful amongst comics readers.
Interestingly, another example from the world of comics is Neil Gaiman's character Timothy Hunter, from The Books of Magic. Timothy is a young English boy with family issues (and a pet owl) who discovers that he's a wizard. The first mini-series of The Books of Magic came out in 1990, seven years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. When asked about it, Gaiman simply says that any similarities are superficial and coincidental. I suspect he would find the idea of suing JK Rowling as laughable (although others are not so accommodating).
Which brings us back to the ideas shop. It's a franchise, of course, and the stock all comes from the same design house and factories. Ideas are expensive, and the more fully-formed they are, the higher the price. A completely interwoven series of themes and concepts can cost several years, if not a lifetime. So there's a thriving market in secondhand ideas. In fact, some people try to say that there are only seven basic ideas, and all the rest are just rehashes of those old saws. Yet we take those scraps, used time and time again, and weave them into new clothes to try on, new fashions from the old. We reinvent and recombine and it's always ever so slightly different. And when we publish our ideas, they are devoured by our readers, ripped up into their tiny component pieces which end up, inevitably, back at the shop.
I'm not advocating plagiarism in any way. There's a big difference between using someone else's ideas to help form your own, and just using someone else's ideas, or words, wholesale. Copying without permission or acknowledgement is illegal, that's why we call it copyright. But when you take an idea and work it into something different from what came before, then you're no longer copying. You're creating something new.
Comments
I'm getting my ideas these days from reading short stories people send me online...
This Jesus bloodline thing is so a common "knowledge". Eco played around with it, and the German Fantasy writer Peter Berling - I think his first book came out before that Holy Grail nonsense, so he could accuse them of stealing his ideas (which he in fact got from the same sources as Eco, and those are far older than the Grail book).