Plagiarism Part II

Plagiarism Part two

After my post yesterday, it got me to thinking about the collective conscious. (I think a friend started it) :P She knows who she is!

But as I read many, many books I come across writers who I feel FEED off of each other’s ideas.

Two right off the top of my head? Dean Koontz and Stephen King! Not that they plagiarize each other but feed off of a single thought or idea.

What do I mean by "feed off of" and would you like some examples? Ok, I just finished reading The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz AND I read Duma Key by Stephen King. I read Duma first! Do you want to talk about an awesome book? I could go on and on!

Anyway in Duma, there is this man who sketches (yeah the pencil and paper kind) and the pictures just so happen to become a reality. There is a ship, a haunted ship (that only the artist sees) sitting out in the water. I won’t go any further because I will never give a story away.

DEotY by Koontz, has an architect who sketches a dog. A haunting dog with beautiful eyes that seem to speak to him. There is a ship (minor player in this tale) but you see, these books were BOTH published the same year, so there is no way one took the idea from the other but they (being of the same genre) THINK ALIKE! I have had the opportunity to note this happening on more than one occasion between the two authors.
Except the books were published in different years.

I have read books where it appears that one idea has spawned a whole story from a different author. They are not stealing the idea and writing the same story, or stealing sentences and words, calling them their own. They are creating, like any artist would.

Artists can look at the same Willow tree in the setting sun and both paint a different picture. A photographer can snap a picture of Redwood trees and a totally different photographer can capture the exact same trees but in a different light and maybe make the National Geographic cover.

This is what happens to writers sometimes in their writing. In my writing workshop, there are weekly prompts. I set the stage and the author writes at least 500 words or less from one sentence (maybe two.) On more occasions than one, we have often leaked into our writing the same story and sometimes we unknowingly used the exact same character’s name.

There is a difference in surfing ideas off an image, ideas or a word and plagiarism. The two do not walk hand in hand like lovers under the moonlit sky. As writer’s we feed off of what others write (by reading a story) and out of our imagination our own story forms, and we’re down the stretch to making the individual piece our very own artistic masterpiece.

An idiom that comes to mind, "Great Minds think alike." I don’t know the original author of this or I would surely give her/him credit for doing so. Because, in a nutshell we are all of one collective conscious, kindred spirits where like minds collide in a kaleidoscope of thoughts and ideas.

Writers are the artists that form beauty from words. I’ll leave the painting to those artists.

"In a world of discoloration, the writer reigns in beauty all with the mighty word." ~joni