Dang it

Aug 25, 2014 19:28

So,deep_time, remember that story I was working on... OK, a long time ago"? Here it is:

The Frozen Ground.

Haven't seen the film yet, and I had very different (and completely fictional) characters, but the basic plot matches this summary pretty closely. Just, you know...a few years too late.

writing

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Comments 6

ssilverfish August 26 2014, 13:00:09 UTC
Honestly, don't worry about it. Harry Potter was not the first boy to go to wizard school. You can still write your story and it will be very different than this film, the screenplay, and whatever it was based on. Next time you're at a bookstore, see if you can find this book and thumb through it: Steal Like an Artist.

Even with "high concept" stuff that sounds very specific (time traveling serial killer, girl on the brink of death watches her family and has to make decisions about whether to come back, etc) has been done over and over. What makes it special and different is what you, as the author, bring to it.

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ssilverfish August 26 2014, 13:02:48 UTC
HAHA! I just clicked on the link above and saw that I recommended the Austin Kleon in my comments there, too. Guess that one resonated with me, hehe....

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veijukka August 26 2014, 19:16:24 UTC
LOL...yes, and I bought a used copy and read it shortly thereafter. Academic writing really did cripple my ability to write fiction for a while...this book was helpful in getting out of the mindset that I have to footnote everything I steal from elsewhere.

I came to the same conclusion (stop worrying and write the thing) early this morning. I had stepped away from that story because I still wasn't certain of the direction in which I wanted to take it. But as I thought about it this morning, I realized that whenever I thought back on it, it was to the serial killer/monster in the woods angle. The sucker punch I felt realizing the story was "taken" reinforced that. But you're right...again, totally different characters with totally different motivations.

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ssilverfish August 26 2014, 19:39:40 UTC
That's the spirit. I understand the sucker punch, too. I've felt it before myself and I'm a little concerned about feeling it again, given that I've been sitting on my WIP for a while and there are a few elements of it that I love that I feel are fairly original. Objectively, they've probably been done in some fashion before, but the illusion that I've come up with something nobody has done yet makes me feel like I'm still in the race!

I think the sucker punch comes from the internal heckler though, so I try to dismiss it. Like, "See, you're not as original as you think!" Gotta punch the heckler right back, tell it it's wrong, and get back to work.

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deep_time August 27 2014, 03:19:56 UTC
Haha. I used to keep a running tally of all the plots I came up with and later found in someone else's hands. The most egregious is Lost: circa 1996 I came up with the idea of a group of castaways (by boat, not plane) washing up on an uncharted island with mysterious mysteries around them and some kind of secret lab at the heart of it. But everything's been done before and will be done again.

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veijukka August 27 2014, 20:14:52 UTC
Nothing new under the sun, right? Even more incentive to keep at it. And at least the fact that there's a movie (or a TV show, or a graphic novel, or whatever) shows that there's interest, right?

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