My Version of the Story
A wise woman (Actually, it was my novelist mother, but I’ve recently started to think that adults shouldn’t start sentences with “My mom said…”) once told me that there was only one plot in the world. This is not an original assertion, but her way of putting it is my favorite. She said, “There is only one plot. Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.”
I said, of course—as you will—“But that’s two plots!” And then she said, “No, it’s the same journey seen from two different perspectives.”
Whether you think there’s only one plot, or two, or seven (a common claim), there is not an infinite number, only infinite variation in the possible ways to tell them. That infinite variation is what makes me believe what I believe about story sharing, namely that writers don’t need to compete over ideas. The same idea in two different hands is not the same story (which is also why you can’t copyright ideas, only the execution of them).
When I was a kid, the wise woman told me that she and I didn’t need to worry about laying claim to our ideas. We could both write about anything we wanted to, and there would never be any danger that we would write the same book. We didn’t, however, actually try it until quite recently, when she submitted a list of ideas to an agent who was interested in working with her from the genesis to the completion of a novel. I helped her make the list. She came up with the ideas, and I helped her flesh them out.
One idea on the list stuck with me: There’s a hit-and-run, and the driver of the car leaves the scene but can’t get the victim out of his thoughts. My mom has a dark mind, and in her version, the driver is consumed by guilt and drawn increasingly into the lives of the victim’s family members, eventually losing perspective and neglecting his own family.
In my version, it’s a romance novel (of course). It’s not a hit-and-run, it’s a meet-cute! Nobody dies, the hit-and-run victim is injured, not killed, and nobody goes off the deep end—the driver just dabbles in legal trouble.
We both started writing—she, her dark drama, and I, my romance—and it was apparent from the get-go that the stories were unrecognizably different. She had dark roads and broken marriages and brooding protagonists. I had a misguided sister with an abusive boyfriend, a family on the brink of patching up its long-standing issues, and a heroine ready to forgive.
And here’s the punchline: She didn’t end up finishing her book because she decided it wasn’t viable, and I ended up cutting the hit-and-run incident out of my romance novel because I decided it wasn’t a functioning subplot. As a result? No hit-and-run accident books. No overlap. No problem.
With the exception of the wise woman, I don’t borrow other people’s stories. I don’t think profligate plot sharing (writerly communism?) works in all communities. But I do like that our little experiment reinforced my belief in how infinitely rich stories are, and how little need we have to feel panicky or covetous. The stories won’t run out. They won’t run away from us. And as long as we write from our hearts, we don’t need to worry about telling a story that’s already been told—only about telling it again, and better this time.
What about you? Have you ever knowingly told a story that’s already been told—a retelling for example? Have you ever asked a friend if you can “have” an idea whose ownership is dubious? Have you ever fought with someone over an idea?
February 15, 2012 @ 4:25 pm
I haven’t, but I can see what you mean. Our STRANGERS ON A TRAIN collaboration certainly highlights what different results you get when you give five people the same prompt!
February 15, 2012 @ 6:47 pm
Especially because that’s a prompt with a fairly high degree of specificity. Even with all that direction regarding length, audience, genre, etc, the stories still have a completely different feel.
February 15, 2012 @ 4:27 pm
Hah, this is very cute. Actually I am mostly a romance-only reader but your mom’s book sounded pretty cool. And I love her advice about the story. Now I’m all confused about which one my books are. It seems like it should be obvious, and yet, it’s not.
I haven’t really started a story with the same theme or setup yet. I did participate in some flash fiction with prompts back in the early days of my blogging and those all ended up crazy different from everyone else’s. On the subject of different versions, though, there was something interesting that happened lately. I had a critique partner who I’d worked with before though we both wrote different things. Well, one day she says, hey I have this story, it’s kind of dark, could you read it for me? I agree and the premise is just like this story I’m working on. I mean, it’s so close that I immediately send off my story like, see, I’m not copying you, since I have all this already written. Anyways, by premise I mean, the setup and the backstory, but the actual plots progress very differently and feel different as well. But we felt like it was one of those weird meaningful coincidences, and it was pretty cool. So we both critiqued each other’s work and got a different perspective on the subject matter. This was the biggest example but I’ve had smaller things like this come up, where I’ll talk with an author and we’ll figure out that we both wrote about something similar or used a certain technique in a scene or even a similar analogy in a line. I am used to my writing being “out there” so I appreciate it more when I find similarities between authors rather than disparities.
February 15, 2012 @ 6:51 pm
That’s really interesting, about the convergence between your story and your friend’s. I do think that when people work closely together, or interact within a small community, that can happen. A CP and I discovered that we’d used the same cliche in our books written in the same timeframe. We don’t know if we both independently used it or whether one of us “stole” it from the other. In the end, we both took it out, because, hey, it was a cliche. I’ve definitely noticed convergence with CPs on certain themes or even types of characters, and when I read books by people who I know read each others’ stuff, I see an increasing number of similarities. Even so, with a few exceptions, the voices and the choices are so different that it doesn’t matter.
February 28, 2012 @ 6:25 pm
One my FAVORITE books is a Bed of Thorns and Roses by Sondra Allan Carr. It’s a historical romance and a take-off from Beauty and Beast. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet. I do believe that at this point every possible plot HAS been done, it’s only the telling that is different.
February 28, 2012 @ 6:34 pm
Ooh, I’m definitely going to read that. I’m a big fan of the Beauty & the Beast trope (or whatever you’d call it). And I like the deliberate retellings, in general, esp the fairy-tale-ish ones.
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