Checking for Plagarism

i don't think anyone can copyright a story idea or a plot twist. most things have been done before-- as long as you're doing it differently and in your own words, i wouldn't worry about it.

You can't plagiarize or copyright ideas. (Check out the lawsuit re: Dan Brown)
Plagerism means you copy portions of text so that you are using another writer's words.
If your book is like another you can be "derivative" or your book can be over done. These problems are far more common. The way to make sure you are original is to do a lot of reading in your genre. That will give you a better idea of which ideas and plot premises are over used or not.

It HAS been done before. Just do it better

Sometimes I worry when I get a tingle of deja vu that I'm writing something that I've seen or read years ago, loved, and tucked away in my mind. I'm sure that happens all the time though.

Red Robin said:

Sometimes I worry when I get a tingle of deja vu that I'm writing something that I've seen or read years ago, loved, and tucked away in my mind. I'm sure that happens all the time though.

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This, right here, is my single biggest fear when it comes to my writing. I read books in my genre constantly. What if I read a clever line three or four years ago, liked it and then forgot about it, only to have it pop on the page while I'm writing my own story?

I notice I worry about this more if it's a line I really like. As if I couldn't have possibly come up with something so clever on my own.

My WIP is pretty derivative (so was my first novel), but the way I'm dealing with it is by mentioning what I'm deriving from right there in the text.

I think that's called an homage.

At least that's what I'm going to call it if I'm ever lucky enough to do interviews.

Hatsumomo said:

So, I have a major plot twist in my storyline, but I'm wondering if it has been done before (wouldn't be surprised if it had). I ask if there's a way to check for this because if I somehow managed to get published and a decent readership, I don't want another author popping up with a lawsuit because I stole her/his story.

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It's already been mentioned, but plagiarism is actually taking someone else's words for your own, not someone else's idea.

An example of this would be quoting, say, H.G. Wells' book War of the Worlds and claiming you had made up the quote yourself. That's a basic idea of what plagiarism is.

However, if you were to write a book about an invasion from Mars, which is what War of the Worlds was about, that would not be plagiarism.

For anything to be plagiarism, it has to use the exact words another author used before you.

I hope this helps, and good luck to you.

Just because of the title of this thread I have to tell a completely unrelated plagiarism story. A few years back I was teaching adult business English in mainland China. We're talking business professionals between 25 and 50 years of age. I assigned a 3-page paper for the big semester project. Much to my surprise, the overall quality of the student papers was much better than I had come to expect from them. I got through about 3 before I realized it was TOO good. Five minutes on Google and I had discovered that not just some, but ALL of my students had copied their papers directly from the internet. Except one. ONE SINGLE STUDENT wrote his own paper. Automatic A+, baby!

I let everyone else rewrite. And boy was that a struggle. Apparently plagiarism is a western concept. In China it's considered a compliment. Two weeks later I was still trying to explain that lifting whole sentences was NOT OKAY. So rather than a term project, that turned into an object lesson in western culture. IE, If you are making a business deal with someone from the west, DO NOT GIVE THEM PLAGIARIZED MATERIAL!

I think it's impossible not to be influenced in some way by what you've read, but as the others say, you'd have to be lifting whole exact quotes to be in trouble. Look at Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman....There are a ton of stories on the same premise. :nod:

If you're worried about it having been used before, you could try putting some general phrases into a search engine: look up 'plot twists' plus some key words related to your specific plot twist. It won't be perfect, but it might show up if there's been any online discussion of a similar case.

I don't think it has to be the exact words to be plagiarism, but it has to be sufficiently similar, in substantial amounts. There was a famous case recently of a young woman whose first novel bore a striking resemblance to a published work. IIRC correctly, not only was the basic plot the same, but at equivalent points in the story, the sentences were worded very similarly.

To take a made-up example that might be familiar to many, let's say you write a space opera about a farm boy who dreams of being a pilot, and who joins a rebellion after the Evil Empire murder his family. So far it's not plagiarism, it's just a bit derivative. If the rest of your story is completely different from the plot of "Star Wars", no-one is likely to mind - or at least, not much. George Lucas can't sue you for borrowing a couple of plot points.

However if you start adding in a feisty princess, a pair of comedy robots and a cyborg villain, you're heading into plagiarism territory (unless it's parody, in which case you're OK). Likewise, if your plot is original but, when your protagonist Mark goes into the spaceport bar, you have a section of dialogue like this:

'He doesn't like you.'
'I'm sorry.' Mark turned away.
'I don't like you either,' the alien said, grabbing Mark's shoulder. 'You just watch yourself. We're wanted men. I have the death sentence on twenty planets.
'I'll be careful.'
'You'll be dead!'

- that's also plagiarism (even though I changed one sentence slightly).

HTH

Anne

It's also awfully hard to do plagarism without the intent to do so. Remember, plagarists are lazy people--they want to be successful (or not do the homework), but don't want to work at it. Years and years ago, I caught a plagiarist in a high school class. We had to write a story for a creative writing class, and then read them aloud. The more this person read, the more I kept thinking, "I've read this before." By the time she got to the end, I'd pinged on where'd I'd seen it--and what she'd changed to "make it hers." She'd copied it word for word out of an old Reader's Digest issue and changed the gender of the main character and likely some of phrasing. If you look at the successful cases of plagarism, you'll find that a lot of them hinge on what was written, where it looks like whole phrases and storylines were simply copied and then had small changes made to them to make them look different.

But if you want to protect yourself, keep "shop notes." Make regular, permanent backups of your work, as well as any dated notes, email correspondence, etc. to show when things were created.

I'll never forget the first case of plagiarism I experienced in the early '70's. I worked on the literary magazine in high school and students submitted their poetry and our committee decided whether it should be in the magazine. One girl submitted a poem and we had her re write it several times --maybe three or four times before we accepted it. Come to find out the original submission was a poem by Rod McKuen!
Of course we had her re write it so much it bore little resemblance to the original!
Too funny!

Patricia's story reminds me of one aspect of the Janet Dailey plagiarism from several years ago that I never really understood. The excuse was, in large part, pressure to produce pages for deadlines, but it had to have been HARDER and more time-consuming to find and then fit the lifted passages into her story than to just write the passages herself, especially since they were all fairly generic phrases/paragraphs, entirely functional, but nothing particularly lyrical or complicated in any manner.

Heck, I've even found it's easier to write a story over from scratch than to try to cut and paste bits of an earlier version that's being massively re-worked, and that's using text that I'm intimately familiar with, not stuff that I'd have to search through and then fidget with enough that it matched the patterns of my own writing.

JD

Linda Adams said:

It's also awfully hard to do plagarism without the intent to do so. Remember, plagarists are lazy people--they want to be successful (or not do the homework), but don't want to work at it.

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Great point. Anyone who's ever tried to re-create a WIP from memory after a computer crash knows how hard it is. And that's when it's your own work, and usually a contemporaneous effort. Plagiarists--despite their universal invocation of the inadvertence defense--invariably do it deliberately.

JoNightshade said:

I let everyone else rewrite. And boy was that a struggle. Apparently plagiarism is a western concept. In China it's considered a compliment. Two weeks later I was still trying to explain that lifting whole sentences was NOT OKAY. So rather than a term project, that turned into an object lesson in western culture. IE, If you are making a business deal with someone from the west, DO NOT GIVE THEM PLAGIARIZED MATERIAL!

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I had this problem all the time in my writing classes at the community college where I used to teach.

I worked as a composition instructor and in our writing center, and it always amazed me that foreign students could not (or would not) catch on to citation/appropriation issues. In an English 101 class I taught I had a Pakistani brother-and-sister team who were pretty rabid plagiarists. They tried to play it off as if they didn't understand the language or American customs, but I think they were simply conning me.

There was a debate among my colleagues about whether or not foreign students should be given the benefit of the doubt with plagiarism/MLA/APA issues. My feeling is that they shouldn't; the concepts of appropriation and plagiarism, while they might be "western concepts," are not that difficult to grasp.

In a faculty meeting I voiced my opinion that foreign students were just as apt to be intellectual thieves as American students. Not sure if my colleagues agreed with me or not, but I still feel that way. I began to notice, on every campus where I taught, a sort of kids gloves approach to foreign student misconduct by the faculty and a more militant approach to that of American students.

That's grossly unfair, in my opinion.

Will Lavender said:

There was a debate among my colleagues about whether or not foreign students should be given the benefit of the doubt with plagiarism/MLA/APA issues. My feeling is that they shouldn't; the concepts of appropriation and plagiarism, while they might be "western concepts," are not that difficult to grasp.

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Failing these people would have been a quick introduction to the western concept, no debate needed.

I've never encountered the idea of leniency toward foreign students before. At the University of Toronto, there are plenty of foreigners. U of T also has draconian measures to deal with plagiarism. Don't quote me, but I believe the first offence is an F on the assignment, second is expulsion. Of course there is the problem of application of the rules...

Julie Worth said:

Failing these people would have been a quick introduction to the western concept, no debate needed.

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Did that.

I Googled one of the brother's essays. It was David Hume, word for word.

Red Robin said:

I've never encountered the idea of leniency toward foreign students before. At the University of Toronto, there are plenty of foreigners. U of T also has draconian measures to deal with plagiarism. Don't quote me, but I believe the first offence is an F on the assignment, second is expulsion. Of course there is the problem of application of the rules...

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I wonder if American universities are different.

In America, there is a whole PC/anti-PC debate raging, and much of the conversation centers around the teaching practices of public universities.

You could try a Google search using key words that refer to your plot twist and see if anything similar to your idea pops up.

If you put in red shoes+ balloon+escape+wizard it will bring up references to the Wizard of Oz film.

Perhaps your twist requires black boots, a stagecoach, escape, and McGyver. The devil is in the details!

That or read the library.

Plagiarism is direct copying of another's work and can be a conscious or unconscious act. If you are worried about latter, then discussion of your twist with others who read widely can be a huge help to you.

That you are aware of it as a possibility is a very good thing, more power to you!

You may find this cautionary tale of interest.

And the follow up.

Good luck!

Linda Adams said:

It's also awfully hard to do plagiarism without the intent to do so. Remember, plagiarists are lazy people--they want to be successful (or not do the homework), but don't want to work at it. Years and years ago, I caught a plagiarist in a high school class. We had to write a story for a creative writing class, and then read them aloud. The more this person read, the more I kept thinking, "I've read this before."

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Back in the days when I worked for a living, I would occasionally write up patent applications and send them off to the legal department. Once, to save time, I copied the generic "background of the invention" section from another patent--a common practice, as patents are in the public domain. The patent attorney assigned to the case began to read it, thinking it was pretty sharp writing, until he realized he'd written it himself! Good thing he remembered, because, while it was okay for me to cut and paste, it might have gotten him in hot water, as he'd written it while at another company.

Linda Adams said:

It's also awfully hard to do plagarism without the intent to do so.

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Actually, it's not that hard to inadvertently plagiarise an idea in some detail - many years ago, I was very proud of a role-playing character I had created until I realised he was a rip-off of Hanse Shadowspawn, the hero of several short stories I had read

Likewise, it's possible to accidentally plagiarise large chunks of a one-time favourite book if you have read and re-read it many times and then forgotten about it. The human mind is a strange thing, full of memories we can't access directly - and when we write, ideas that come to us "out of the blue" are actually the products of unconscious, non-verbal thought processes...

I'm not saying this is an excuse for plagiarism, but I can see how at least some instances could be genuinely accidental, especially when writing fiction.

I just have to add one thing...

P-L-A-G-I-A-R-I-S-M.

Learn it. Feel free to copy it directly.