People steal my thoughts then travel back in time and use them

[Boneman]

You grade your children according to height? Neat.... God help you whn growth spurts kick in at different times..... that must be why I have only 2 kids, both boys, and am incpable of calling them by their given names!

[flynx]

Originally Posted by Boneman

You grade your children according to height? Neat.... God help you whn growth spurts kick in at different times..... that must be why I have only 2 kids, both boys, and am incpable of calling them by their given names!

It's just really fortunate that he's the tallest (6'6") the other two are taller than me also. Being the middle child of my own family (and co-incidentally the tallest) I really didn't like referring to him as the 'middle child'. Youngest and eldest are fine descriptions so I just started calling him the tallest.

(the other two are over 6' as well and being in their twenties I don't think there is likely to be any more growth)

[dreir]

You can always hope that your original ideas and plotlines were used by some obscure author that nobody's ever heard about. A few months ago I found my original, ten-years-in-the-making story already told by Ursula K Le Guin (whom I've never read), so that sucked . I guess one way to avoid this is to read every single book out there before you start anything..

- dreir -

[Dave]

Amazingly, I think this might yet happen to me too. I was just thinking the other day about sitting down and writing a series of comedic, tragic and historical plays from ideas I had been having. I also wanted to write a few sonnets to a friend, and a couple of poems. Strike me when I found them all published together 400 years ago. The only sane explanation would be that after I write them down, some Time Traveler reads them, copies them and takes them back in Time.

[mygoditsraining]

"Originality is the key to plagiarism" - William Noble, Steal this plot!

Out of print now, I believe, but quite a good book about concurrent themes in fiction.

[SNG]

So many books are written about the same thing, with the same concept behind (sometimes I get really frustrated trying to choose a crime novel to buy), just in different ways.

Don't get discouraged. Even if the idea is similar you'd probably have your own different spin on it.

Originally Posted by Dave

Amazingly, I think this might yet happen to me too. I was just thinking the other day about sitting down and writing a series of comedic, tragic and historical plays from ideas I had been having. I also wanted to write a few sonnets to a friend, and a couple of poems. Strike me when I found them all published together 400 years ago. The only sane explanation would be that after I write them down, some Time Traveler reads them, copies them and takes them back in Time.

There is another possibility - reincarnation.

[Precision Grace]

I used to get really annoyed by this for years, in my case it was films that 'stole' my original ideas and as far as the books go, most recently it was Harry Potter

It doesn't bother me any more because I have come to realise that noone owns ideas, they belong to the collective human-ity and the challenge is to tell them well, not to think of them first nor even to get them into print first. If you think about it, people spend few hours, at most, few days reading a book, and if it's a good book, their first thought upon finishing is often: ' I wish there was another book similar to this that I could read straight away now'.

Besides, there is nothing worse than having an original idea that other people adopt in the most asinine and heinous ways. (Einstein told me this when we was having tea on the time bend between the small and large intestine)

[Tyrael]

I wonder if anyone has had an idea that has not been pilfered by this psychic novelist.

[RcGrant]

Yes. Inkheart. It was the scariest feeling ever, because the novel I am writing feels (to me at least) the most likely to get anywhere, out of all of the ideas I currently have.

I bought the book, came home, read a bit, moped around, then realised it isn't really that similar after all.

One thing I did ponder: if said similar idea is received well, maybe it's a good sign!

[Ursa major]

Originally Posted by RcGrant

One thing I did ponder: if said similar idea is received well, maybe it's a good sign!

And there's another advantage: you have the beginnings of an answer when the publisher/agent asks a question about how your book compares with other recently-successful authors in the same genre (as mentioned, for example, in http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum...40-post33.html in this thread: What do publishers prefer?).

[The Bloated One]

Boneman,

I have no way of knowing if there is any basis of fact to the Monkey story, but if there is, God help us if the monkeys ever start writing Sci Fi...........

Didn't I read somewhere that monkeys and typewriters wrote Shakespeare? If true,what hope has sci fi?

TBO

[Boneman]

You little monkey, you...........

[Ursa major]

Not any monkey will do; you have to have the right type....

[Boneman]

But he said there was a typing monkey, didn't he? What would it be? Marmo(type)set? I like that, it's very close to Marmite.....

[mygoditsraining]

All of the above with regards to Shakespeare is incorrect. In the future, an infinite monkey universe will be collided with an infinite typewriter universe and the resulting page-fragments will fall back through time to form the works of Chaucer, Marlowe and many others; Shakespeare will just plagiarise the lot!

Shakespeare is ripping off the future interdimensional monkeys. It's on the internet now, so it must be true!

Also most authors have their work created by this method. If you haven't received your time-displaced monkey pages yet, keep your fingers crossed (also, pray yours has no poop on it -- those simian rapscallions!).