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Is it okay to steal subplots from your own work?

Lalaloopsy

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Let's just imagine both works get published.

Hypothetically speaking, I write a book about a group of friends who decide to open a community centre together. The main plot doesn't really revolve around the centre, but the lead up to its creation and the struggle it takes. The book is mostly about the strain on their relationship. The centre doesn't open until the last two chapters.


Now, lets say I want to write an entirely new book featuring the same community centre. The characters from the original novel don't feature, but the backstory about how it opened will remain the same. It will focus on the town citizens and their problems.

The same could be said for any type of business, really. Like using the same bookshop or cafe in all of your unrelated novels.

What do you think of this? Thanks for reading.
 

lizmonster

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This is a thing I see a lot in romance. Since a romance ends by definition with the joining of the MC couple, you can't really have a series the same way you do in some genres, so a lot of romance authors follow the same location, or the same group of friends. I enjoy that a lot; it makes the worldbuilding more real to me.

I think your idea is not only "okay" but kind of cool.
 

Lakey

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This happens all the time. I agree that it’s fun and a nice little present to your readers.

I can think of many examples off the type of my head but here is a fun one: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon follows a couple generations of several families in WWII and in the 90s. Later he wrote The Baroque Cycle, set in the 17th century, in which families of the same names appear, and are clearly ancestors of the corresponding characters in Cryptonomicon. The two sets of stories stand completely independently, but knowing the connection makes it even more fun. Stephenson’s equivalent of your coffee house or community center are, perhaps, the fictional outer-outer British Isle of Qwlghm, and the fictional Pacific island of Kinakuta, locations which play important roles in both sets of stories.

:e2coffee:
 

benbenberi

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Sharing a setting and connected characters is a fun thing that authors have done forever in a lot of genres. Readers love it. And little cross-references even in stories that are otherwise completely separate helps build the illusion that the stories exist in a world that's larger than just the bounds of the pages and that it keeps on existing even when author and readers aren't watching it. Back in the 19c Anthony Trollope did this with his Barsetshire and Palliser novels, and many others since then.
 

MythMonger

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It's not stealing, it's shared universe. Knock yourself out.

I also like the idea of a shared universe. Stephen King will do that with several of his books. It'll be like, totally not a story about It, but then... Pennywise reference.