605 – Copying Other Stories

These days, talk about copying stories is often related to LLMs and other slop generators, but did you know that writers can copy each other without any need for abominable intelligence? Sometimes, it’s not even a bad thing to do! But other times it is, and we’re gonna get to the bottom of it. Or at least, we’ll get to the “I know it when I see it” of it. ## Show Notes - The Lord of the Rings - Eragon - Winnie the Pooh Slashers - Sherlock Holmes - The Wheel of Time - Little Women - Follow the Sound of Snow - Cinder House - Lynne Freeman vs Tracy Wolff - The Name of the Wind - Sun Eater - First Kill - Romeo and Juliet - What Moves the Dead - The House of Usher ## Transcript **Generously transcribed by Abby K.** Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. **Chris:** Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.  **Oren:**  And I’m Oren.  **Chris:** This time we’re doing “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” an episode that we absolutely did not just do last week. **Oren:**  This is a new episode. It’s different. Why would you say it’s the same?  **Chris:**  It’s on the moon now. We’re just talking on the moon, so it’s very different and that will have a very large impact on this episode and how we talk about breaking the fourth wall. **Oren:** We’re talking about breaking the *fifth* wall, because moon stations are pentagons. That’s just how it works.  **Chris:**  That’s right, the fifth wall. Completely different than the fourth wall. Absolutely not inspired by the fourth wall in any way.  **Oren:** Yeah, don’t even worry about it.  **Chris:** Today we’re going to talk about should you copy a story for your story? Is that a good idea, a bad idea? When would you, when shouldn’t you?  **Oren:**  Yeah, how literal is that phrase, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”? That’s the question. That’s really what we’re trying to answer today.  **Chris:**  Obviously copying can mean a lot of different things. It’s pretty broad. But it can mean anything from, this is where you get some very loose inspiration from, to very specific. \[Laughs] We have seen some things that I found kind of shocking in how on the nose they were with what they were copying.  **Oren:**  Yeah. Occasionally you’re like, “Really? This is just a book that I’ve read before.”  **Chris:**  We hear this a lot — and I think it can happen later too — but we hear this a lot with newer writers, right? A lot of times it is trying to be some kind of copy of our favorite story. I think because, you know, that was magical and we’re just trying to recreate the magic. So, if you really like *Lord of the Rings*, you might write *Eragon*.  **Oren:**  Yeah, and it’s interesting because to a certain extent, that is a function of how old the story is. Once a story is old enough, it stops feeling weird to do “my” version of it. At this point, even *Lord of the Rings* is still too recent. We had a *Lord of the Rings-*like boom after *Lord of the Rings*, and now we’ve finally moved past it, and now if you’re like, “I’m doing *Lord of the Rings*, but different,” people will be like, “Try something new.” They will give you the side eye. But if you say, “I’m doing ‘Hansel and Gretel’ but different,” they’ll be like, “Ooh, that sounds interesting. Tell me more about this Hansel and Gretel retelling that you’re doing.” We can’t do Lord of the Rings retellings yet.  **Chris:**  I mean that is still a copyrighted work that you’d have to spend so much money to write something that is officially *Lord of the Rings*.  But at the same time, so many people have made off-brand copies, right? That it’s almost cliche but also forbidden simultaneously. That’s not a great place for it to be in.  **Oren:** And I mean a lot of it is just sort of set by the legality of United States copyright durations. But, like, I don’t know, technically speaking, Winnie-the-Pooh is public domain now. But outside of these low-budget horror parodies, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of people doing a Winnie-the-Pooh retelling. It just doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen yet.  **Chris:** I mean, maybe. I guess it’s a kid’s story, right? **Oren:** Right.  **Chris:** I never consumed Winnie-the-Pooh when I was a kid, so I don’t know. But that kind of seems like if it’s public domain, it might show up in new Winnie-the-Pooh stories in the children’s books section, and we might not hear about it because it might not get the level of buzz of the stories that we hear about, but maybe something like that might happen. **Oren:** An example that people were totally doing this even when the stories were technically still in copyright is, like, Sherlock Holmes, for example. Well, some of the later stories were in copyright longer than you would’ve thought, but people were still doing retellings of Sherlock Holmes even when it was partially still copyrighted, and that didn’t seem weird, right? That didn’t seem creatively problematic. It was just cool to do because people like to see different takes on Sherlock Holmes. You still need to do something interesting, but even if copyright wasn’t an issue, I don’t think anyone would be interested in my “What if *Wheel of Time,* but they’re all crabs!” take. I just don’t think that would be interesting to people.  **Chris:** I’m sure somebody wants to read *Wheel of Time* as crabs, at least for a laugh. But it’s not really the same, though.  **Oren:**  Yeah. **Chris:** I mean, if it is really in the public domain, right, because we were just talking last week about, for instance, Little Women, and how many adaptations there are because it’s public domain. And so if it’s a famous story and anybody who wants to can make an adaptation, there’s tons of adaptations. So if you don’t have a super huge budget, like you’re making a movie, then you need to put a spin on it, or you don’t really have anything to sell your story on, why would your story get attention?  By the way, past Chris Winkle could benefit from this knowledge. Not that she really cared when she did a “Snow Queen” retelling.  **Oren: Follow the Sound of Snow** is an excellent novella.  **Chris:** Yeah. It happened to hit at a time when the fairy tale retellings were receding as a trend, which is the worst time. But also, it just didn’t have an easy hook, right? It’s not like “The Snow Queen,” but Gerda is dead or something.  **Oren: “**The Snow Queen,” but crabs.  **Chris:** \[Laughing] “The Snow Queen,” but crabs. Or like *Cinder House*, which is a Cinderella retelling that did actually get nominated for Hugo, right? Yeah. It’s Cinderella, but Cinderella is dead, is a ghost in the house, right? Just something that’s really obvious you can sell the book on where it’s different.  **Oren:**  That one definitely deserves to win. That’s easily the best of the six novellas that were Hugo nominated this year.  **Chris:** If it’s public domain that’s what you want. But what happens with a lot of new writers is they see their favorite story, and then they just want to write their own and recapture the magic. And usually that’s something that doesn’t work out so well because it doesn’t have–  Again, we want the author to put in their unique vision, and a lot of times you’re just doing the same thing that somebody else did, but not as good. **Oren:** Right. I mean, the classic scenario that we run into a lot with our clients is that the story has all of the problems of the work that it’s copying, and none of the things that made the work it’s copying good. It’s easy to copy the mistakes. It’s harder to copy the parts that worked well.  **Chris:** Yeah, because you need the same situation, and you’d be surprised how much changing one thing breaks something else and it doesn’t work anymore. So that’s something that happens. I think it’s good for people to, if they’re going to take inspiration from another story, just go into it intentionally. **Oren:** Yeah. **Chris:** And of course, when we have that first big idea, then we just have to write it. There’s often not a lot of intention that goes into that. And sometimes I feel like people just aren’t necessarily consciously aware of where their inspiration comes from. Like, I had one client that the story was clearly very based on a video game, and I asked him what his inspiration was, and he named some other things. Now, it’s also possible that he knew it was heavily based on this video game, and he just didn’t want to say that because he thought it would make him look bad or something.  **Oren:** Yeah.  **Chris:** But it was a situation where the same world elements from this video game that were named the same things that just made it very obviously on the mark, right? And he was like, “Oh yeah, now that you mention it, maybe I did take inspiration from that video game.” It’s like, you didn’t know? Because when I was looking at the work, I was like, “Why is this named this? That’s a weird name for it to be called. I wonder why it’s named that.” And it turns out it’s just because that’s what it was called in the video game. **Oren:** Really weird to be reading a story inspired by Solitaire, let me tell you.  **Chris:** \[*Laughs*] **Oren:** My general advice for writers is when they are thinking about if they see something in a book that they really like, and this is not an old book where you could copy it and then put your own spin on it and call it a retelling — we’ll assume that’s off the table — you can use that, but you have to change it to the point that it can’t be recognized. If a lot of people can read this and reliably say, “Oh yeah, you took this from such and such,” that’s not great. **Chris:**  We do get people, though, who ask us because they’re worried about copying where it’s just fine, because there are so many repeated tropes and things like that, that like, okay yeah, your model book has this, but tons of books have this. So a particular type of character or a particular type of plot, right? Those things oftentimes are so common that they’re not going to really make your work stand out. Just like that copyright case, Oren, you were looking into where broody love interests came up. **Oren:** So this was the case of Lynn Freeman versus Tracy Wolff, in which Freeman was suing because she claimed that Wolff had copied her YA vampire romance novel. Wolff’s book is actually published. The series is called *Crave*. I read the first one because I was really curious after I read the whole, like, 200-page ruling.  And the ruling was against Freeman, that no, actually, there was no copying here.  And in fact, actually there’s a twist on this. Wolff was just awarded attorney’s fees in that case because the judge basically acknowledged that, yeah, this actually didn’t have any merit and the plaintiff should’ve known that, and the only reason that it took so long to resolve is that none of the previous judges who had this were willing to read the books to see if the claims were accurate. **Chris:** That judge read like six different drafts. **Oren:** Yeah, she read all four published *Crave* books, and then two more later just for fun that were published during the proceedings, and then she read all five or six of Freeman’s unpublished drafts, which, oh boy, I’ve done a lot of reading for some editing projects. I’ve never done *that* much.  **Chris:** There are so many situations where I see people make assumptions that if there’s similarities in the story that somebody must have copied their work. I will say that unless your work is a published bestseller, it’s really unlikely that anybody would want to copy it, and in this case, things that seem like people copied your idea are almost certainly just a coincidence.  Because ideas just don’t really have much value, right? The value is in the work, and people will repeat the same ideas quite a bit. So it’s only that plagiarism happens because people are, for instance, trying to sell something with no effort, in which case they’re going to copy something that’s popular. Or now they just use AI.  **Oren:** Right. Now they just create a bunch of slop books. That case is actually really interesting because I think it has something that is valuable here. So for example, it was ruled that the fact that both books feature vampires who are broody in Alaska, that’s not copyrightable, right? Those are not similar enough to give rise to any kind of legal action, even if Wolfe got the idea from reading Freeman’s unpublished drafts as the accusation went, or having the information given to her by her agent, I think, was the specifics.  **Chris:**  Right. And also, like, a broody vampire in Alaska is not  going to sell your book, right? Those ideas are not success, right? It’s implementing those ideas. **Oren:** You know, Judge McMahon — correctly, as far as I can tell — pointed out that even though these are two vampires in Alaska, they are very different. They are in very different contexts, right? The unpublished one really sounds like it is in a very Twilight-y situation of characters being in a small town, and then the published one, *Crave*, is basically at a magic school, which is entirely different. But I still think that this is not a copyright issue. This is not a legal issue, but I do think *Crave*, the published one — I can’t speak to the unpublished one because I haven’t read it — suffers from channeling too much Twilight.  I think that its love interest is just not very interesting because he’s just Edward again. He’s Edward. I’ve read Edward before. I’ve read a lot of Edwards. This character is very stale at this point. And he also is Edward in ways that don’t really make sense. Like, he’s supposed to be a cool loner, but he’s not a loner. He has a posse that follows him around everywhere. As a result, he seems like a total loser. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m the cool loner. Everyone respects me,” and he’s backed up by, like, five identical guys.  **Chris:** \[Laughs] I mean, that is the risk also of copying, right? Again, you need to add something so that it stays interesting because the more an idea is used, the duller and more boring it gets to everybody, right? **Oren:** Yeah. **Chris:** So bringing something unique to it is important, right? When you’re taking inspiration for something else. Like how much copying is where we get to the point where, as Oren said, it’s uncanny? You can not only identify the source material, but it kind of feels like we’re crossing a moral line, even if it… And I don’t know in these cases. Some of these cases, honestly, I would be…  in copyright court, I would wonder if there could be successful lawsuits there. At least for me, just setting the law aside, what feels like too much?  I would say that if you’re trying to imitate — and I mean yourself with your own brain and your own hands typing on the keyboard, not with technology — one specific aspect of a story, where let’s say you really like the main character, or you like the character dynamic, or there’s a plot point that you really like, or there’s a wordcraft style you really like, or something about the world you really like. Just imitating those things in your own story is not a big deal because you’re  going to make lots of other creative decisions that are completely different from what your inspiration made. And then if you’re doing a good job, you’re  going to adapt, right? So your main character put in a different world is going to be different, and all those things are  going to change. They’re all going to affect each other, and by the time you’re done, again, you probably won’t have … Your inspiration is likely not going to be that recognizable anymore, and most of the book is going to be your own, right?  Even if you were to take like a main character from one story and a plot point from another story and a world from a third story, if you actually can meld them together and have them work together well, I think in the end they’re all  going to be pretty unique. But when I see works taking more than one aspect of the same story, that’s when it starts for me to feel like it’s beginning to cross a line, or it’s too adhering to the original. If I can take a paragraph from your book and a paragraph from your inspiration and see that you’re making the same points in that paragraph, right? Or like I take a page and see how you’re basically saying the same thoughts page by page.  **Oren:** Yeah, but you hit it through a thesaurus, so like, you know — Sure, *The Tale of Two Cities* said, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but I said “It was the greatest of historical periods, it was the least good of historical periods,” which is different. So don’t get on my case. I did have to make it worse to try to make it different, but don’t worry about that.  **Chris:** Yeah. That’s when it starts to become too much. And seeing that happen to *Name of the Wind* a couple times is just very cringey. **Oren:**  Yeah, *The Sun Eater* is the one that I feel comfortable talking about because it’s already selling extremely well.  **Chris:**  It’s best-selling, and I did a critique of it, and I showed a passage from *Name of the Wind* next to a passage from *The Sun Eater*, and that is not normal. Right? Again, the wording is different, but some of the passages, like, the paragraphs of exposition are thought by thought basically following the long, same chain down, and it’s like you should do your own thinking.  **Oren:** And it has just some extremely similar plot points, and the ones that I can think of off the top of my head are the way that it opens with a similar framing device of the main character being like, “Oh, man, I did something really bad that was vague in my attempt to save everybody, but you want to know what that’s about!” Maybe with this series, the people will actually find out what it’s about, because it looks like it might actually be finished. And then later the street urchin phase is extremely similar in both books. To me, that just was not acceptable. I have no idea if it would give any rise to any kind of copyright claim. I would guess probably not. **Chris:** It feels like Rothfuss, if he wanted to… I mean sometimes lawsuits take a long time. But at the same time, all the evidence is there, so it feels like if Rothfuss wanted to sue, he would’ve done it already. But this just feels like a situation where he could, and I don’t… Again, not a lawyer. Don’t know for sure, but that seems…. that’s uncanny.  **Oren:** I’ll come back in three years and let you know.  **Chris:** Three years, you contact Rothfuss and are like, “Hey, so do you want to take care of this?”  **Oren:**  More likely, in three years I will be able to say that this is not my specialty area/field of law, so I should probably not comment on it. **Chris:** You have a disclaimer that we’re not giving legal advice.  **Oren:** Yeah. Disclaimer, not legal advice.  **Chris:**  You go to three years of law school so that you know how to give people a disclaimer that you’re not giving legal advice. That’s what those three years are for. \[*Laughs*] **Oren:**  It’s valuable.  **Chris:**  Because sometimes when people copy a story, the goal is not really taking inspiration. The goal is that they don’t know how to plot their story, right? Or they’re having trouble coming up with what could happen, and so they’re just looking to another story to be their model for what to do and how to write a successful story.  **Oren:**  Yeah, that’s true.  **Chris:** So this is another thing that we see. Honestly, as editors, if somebody comes to us with something like this, it’s kind of useful because then we can study the story that they’re copying and better explain to them why things are working or not working by comparing it to what the original work did. This is done enough that I know that in some situations it *is* useful. For instance, if you are writing a haunted house story, there is a very specific constraint that those stories have, where we have to have an explanation for why people don’t just leave the house.  **Oren:** Yeah.  **Chris:** It’s a thing that every haunted horror story has to explain, and I have a post with ideas for how to explain it, so there are ways to do it. But if you were to take inspiration from another haunted house story, you could use its explanation. Now, what might happen is you change something else and that explanation doesn’t work anymore. But, it’s not like this can’t have use, or it can’t be useful. I do think that it’s sometimes just a replacement for actually learning how storytelling works.  **Oren:** Yeah, they’ve got to learn somewhere, right?  **Chris:** Right. You’ve got to learn from somewhere. You’ve got to start somewhere. So if your understanding isn’t that robust yet and you need some sort of inspiration for how to plot using a model, it kind of makes sense. I do have questions about, like, Oren, what do you think the success rate is? How often does that actually benefit the story that people are working on? **Oren:** In my experience, it is pretty awkward unless the author is skilled enough to take that and then mold it into whatever they need it to be for their story, in which case I usually can’t tell. The chances are high that if I notice that something is like, “Oh, this is from this story,” it’s probably because it isn’t working, and it stood out for not working. And then I was like, “Oh, hey. That’s weird.” Not always, but that’s a good chance that that’s what’s happening. Because if it was working well, I would probably just read over it, and unless it was really obvious, I wouldn’t even notice that it was taken from something else.  **Chris:** I mean, I do have a question of, if we’re doing this to make up for lack of expertise, it’s always  going to take expertise to successfully copy aspects from another work, right? Because you have to understand why they worked in that context so that you can replicate that context in your own story or adjust them.  **Oren:** I feel like it can be decent training wheels, especially for things that authors often kind of instinctually get, but don’t know how to explain, like turning points.  Most authors have some understanding of turning points, and so you can start to understand them by copying one from another story. Like if you read *Lord of the Rings*, you can get an okay understanding of the “surprise reinforcements” turning point. And that doesn’t mean that yours is going to be great, but you can at least sort of understand how it works, and you can start to learn that way. **Chris:** It’s probably better than using a pseudo structure. It’s probably better than, for instance, The Hero’s Journey or *Save the Cat*, and taking those beat sheets and trying to follow them.  **Oren:** Yeah, because those are just gobbledygook, right? Like, those don’t mean anything, whereas at least *Lord of the Rings* is a real book that exists. And it might not be right for you, but if you are completely new to this and you don’t know how any of this works, taking your story, especially, like, a first story that you’re writing and getting experience with, and being like, “Okay, I’m  going to do my own version of some people from a little town meet a wizard and they go out and do stuff,” it’s like, all right. That’s probably not going to sell. At this point, agents don’t want that. But get some experience. You know, could be worse. **Chris:**  Mm-hmm. You do want to pick something, of course, if you’re going to pick a model, that is the same genre and the same tone as what you’re doing, so you’re not transplanting something into something that’s totally different, right? If you don’t want to do action, don’t copy something with action, because it’s just not going to work as well.  **Oren:** Yeah, you probably wouldn’t be copying Die Hard if you wanted to write a cozy. It’s also just important to — whether you are doing a full-on reimagining of a story that’s old enough for it to be okay to do that, or if you are just sorting through the discount book bin for spare parts — you’ve just got to make sure that it fits in the new context that you’re putting it into.  One of my favorite examples is of the sadly only one-season Netflix show *First Kill*, which is a Romeo and Juliet adaptation. They goofed because they have hunters and vampires instead of Montagues and Capulets. The problem is that vampires are evil and hunters are, at the very least, a lot less evil. And so the Romeo and Juliet premise doesn’t really work very well because the two houses are supposed to be alike in dignity, and there’s a serious dignity deficiency here. **Chris:**  Yep. When you change something, the rest doesn’t work very well. I did notice, however, on the positive side, one of my favorite T. Kingfisher stories is *What Moves the Dead*, and I feel like the reason I like that one better is because it’s basically a House of Usher retelling. Because I know plotting is often not Kingfisher’s strength, but “The \[Fall of the] House of Usher” has a very simple, kind of easy-to-execute plot. And I feel that one has a stronger plot because it’s just based on “The Fall of the House of Usher.” **Oren:** You know, House of Usher is old enough that it’s okay to do that. I have a hard time intellectualizing exactly why a book being old makes that okay, but I know it when I see it.  Here’s a question, since we’re near the end here. I was curious, how do you feel about copying writing styles? We’ve talked about when you copy the actual text, and that’s not great, but, like, trying to emulate another author’s prose. At what point is that a problem?  **Chris:** Yeah, I mean, again, when you use AI —  **Oren:** Right. Don’t be doing that.  **Chris:** Because the AI can only do that because it’s stolen the work, right? And you just should not do that. Also it’s not improving your own wordcraft skills, right? So I do think it’s very beneficial or can be very beneficial for somebody to look at other narration, find out, okay, what kind of narration inspires me, what do I like, and then refer to that. Because there’s all sorts of moments of: How do you open a scene? How do you do body language? How do you do description? And \[they] look at their favorite authors who have the wordcraft they like and see what they did, right? And just like copying the plot, it might not work out. Maybe that author is actually very bad at description. They have great lyrical prose that you like, but they’re bad at description, and so maybe copying their description isn’t actually a good idea. Or they’re overly distant, right? So again, it can still have liabilities, but there’s so much to learn about wordcraft and so much to practice, and I think having a reference for let’s see what other people did in general is really useful.  And I also think that if we’re actually doing it ourself by hand and not — again, you should not do what *Sun Eater* did, where you are actually copying the thoughts. We’re just talking about sentence structure, word choice, right? Things like that — I think that once you do it yourself in your own words, it’s just going to be different. It’s not going to be exactly like somebody else’s narration because you’re a different writer and you have a different vocabulary than they do. Honestly, if somebody mimics somebody else too closely, oftentimes it’s  going to be a famous author, their style’s going to be pretty well-known, and I think at that point you’re just losing out in your opportunity because there are some agents and publishers out there who really do wanna see a unique quote-unquote “voice” from writers, right? So I do think that if you were to do it too closely, probably what would happen is somebody would read it and be like, “Oh, this is this famous author,” and you just would lose out on opportunities to distinguish yourself. **Oren:** Or what if I could trick them into thinking I was that famous author? Kaboom.  **Chris:** But I don’t think there’s a super huge risk of that happening, right? If anybody is worried, they can reference more than one author and read several different books. I do think that having a model is instructional, and so much about wordcraft is just based on practice and is always going to change based on who’s writing it, that as long as you’re not actually copying the thoughts that the writer puts down (*Suneater*), I’m not really worried about that becoming a problem.  **Oren:** All right. Well, I think that is a nice and positive message to end this podcast episode on.  **Chris:** So if you liked this episode enough to copy it, consider instead supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  **Oren:** And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.