We all know the expression. And I believe it to be true, at least thematically. Perspective shifts, among other techniques, help keep concepts fresh. But last night I was watching Family Tree (new Christopher Guest series on HBO), and I was struck yet again by the fact that one of my ideas got executed by someone else first. I've long kept a list of loglines (one-sentence synopses) in a folder for possible writing later. Jotted a lot more of them back in my screenwriting days, and just stumbled over this entry from 1997: "Man decides to research his genealogy only to discover a family of fuckups." GodDAMNit!
Other notable thieveries from my archives include the premises of Six Feet Under, The Faculty, Wanderlust, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
So, which of your concepts have others beaten you to? And could you have done better (without the benefit of hindsight)?
The Wrestler. I wrote a short story titled "Take It Home" about a disgraced pro wrestler in college and then sat on it for years, rather than submit it. Ever since the movie The Wrestler, any time I submit it, they bring up the film and say it is too close. There are many differences, but it always gets lumped together.
Lovecraft. I hate the man. So many stories I've had to abandon because he got there first. I should really get round to reading his stuff.
Also a woeful series on British TV called Demons seemed to steal wholesale from something I was working on and then completely botched it.
Never had the problem honestly, but I might think of odd things.
Dexter, Person of Interest, Heroes, and a couple others I can't recall at the moment.
Sometimes, I wonder if creativity is not in us, but is somehow hardwired into the pool of energy every person's mind operates on. So, ideas aren't born within individuals, but exist in this pool, which we individuals occasionally dip our feet into - or greedily drink from. In this silly little theory of mine, it is those who drink deepest who end up executing those ideas into which we've only but dipped our toes.
Probably makes no sense, but hey, bite me.
@Strange - Ironically, that is an old idea. Jung called it the collective unconscious, building on Freud's archaic remnants.
Yes, I am aware it is an old idea. My Abnormal Psychology degree led me to come in contact with such an old idea years ago. I was merely stating that I wonder if that is why ideas seem to be much less individuated than we would like. Also, I was applying that old idea to a more creative aspect, and less to the emotional connectedness that Jung's theory addressed (in published permutations of his theory, anyway).
But, yeah, thanks.
BTW, the work Jung adapted from Freud wasn't archaic to Jung, since he was a colleague of Freud.
I'm glad you capitalized Abnormal in your degree title. Totally different meaning, otherwise. And bringing it back around to topic, doesn't Abnormal Psychology sound like some kind of Ben Stiller buddy comedy?
Maybe it was an abnormal Psychology degree, because he was actually taking Accounting classes.
And yes, it does. Co-starring Luke Wilson.
@Strange -
BTW, the work Jung adapted from Freud wasn't archaic to Jung, since he was a colleague of Freud.
That sentence is both debatably and factually wrong.
Referring to them as 'colleagues' is a bit of a judgment call, and thus debatable, but I wasn't able to find anyone who agreed with you. I'm not saying that don't exist, but I couldn't locate them in a quick search. 'Mentor' seems to the be the way most people who knew or have studied them describe the relationship.
And, regardless of the time frame the term was either 'archaic remnants' or 'archaic heritage' depending on the translation. Freud was referring to inherited parts of human dispositions and ideas that no longer fit the modern world.
My current project is about an engineer who can't cope with the death of his wife so he dedicates his life to making an AI version of her, with the idea that this will be common practice if he gets it right.
Ray Kurzweil, an engineer in the real world, has similar plans for his dead father (among a lot of other mad scientist type stuff). Kurzweil has been doing/talking about this for awhile, but I only recently found out about it.
That guy takes a crazy number of pills. But an endlessly-fascinating man. That documentary from a couple years ago, what was it called … Transcendent Man … was pretty compelling.
Jung was a student of Freud's, but they had a falling out as a result of Jung's viewpoints. For awhile, Jung was basically blackballed from the field of psycoanalysis because of his theories. However, Jung's theories eventually took hold, especially in the literary arts as archtypal theory, thus part of the reason there is nothing new under the sun.
Meeting Freud[edit]
Jung was thirty when he sent his Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1906. The two men met for the first time the following year, and Jung recalled the discussion between himself and Freud as interminable. They talked, he remembered, for thirteen hours, virtually without stopping'.[20] Six months later, the then 50-year-old Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zurich, which marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted six years and ended in May 1913. At this time Jung resigned as the chairman of the International Psychoanalytical Association, where he had been elected with Freud's support.
Jung and Freud influenced each other during the intellectually formative years of Jung's life. Freud called Jung "his adopted eldest son, his crown prince and successor". As Freud was already fifty years old at their meeting, he was well beyond the formative years. In 1906 psychology as a science was still in its early stages. Jung, who had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, professor in Vienna, now worked as a doctor under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in Burghölzli and became familiar with Freud's idea of the unconscious through Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and was a proponent of the new "psycho-analysis." At the time, Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. Burghölzli was a renowned psychiatric clinic in Zurich at which Jung was a young doctor whose research had already given him international recognition.
Jung de-emphasized the importance of sexual development and focused on the collective unconscious: the part of unconscious that contains memories and ideas inherited from our ancestors. While he did think that libido was an important source for personal growth, he, unlike Freud, believed that libido alone was not responsible for the formation of the core personality.[21]
---- Very quick cut and paste from Wikipedia, because that was one of the first references listed on a google search of Jung and Freud colleagues.
Took me ten seconds to find. If that isn't one interpretation of 'colleague' - and the obvious version I was using the term as, then I suppose we are speaking different languages. While there was a hint of a mentor-protege relationship, that in itself is another form of collegial interaction. So, I guess your quick search must have been nanoseconds in duration. Not to mention a deliberate game of semantics.
I wasn't looking for an argument to be manufactured from the parsing of words, and I am still not, so feel free to do future nanosecond-long searches or whatever. I'm not going to argue with whatever you care to say. My purpose for participating in this thread wasn't to play tag with dictionaries and google searches - I was merely wanting to add my two cents on the topic of dried up wells of creativity.
Sorry to others who had to endure the digression that ensued.
Which goes back to me admitting it was debateable, but hey have at it.
Kurzweil is awesome.
I found that Neil Gaiman and I seem to share an interest in similar story ideas and character types (especially his short stories). At first, I found it frustrating, but now I take inspiration from the fact that a man who seems to write and think the same way I do is so immensely successful. I got hooked on his stuff because he writes what I like to write, which unsurprisingly is also what I enjoy reading.
Nate, it's funny you say that. The few times I've read some of your shorter stuff, I kept thinking there was a hint of Gaiman there. I thought I was just imagining it, but now it makes sense.
Now I have to read some Kurzweil.
I saw a promo for a new series on NBC where people think they're on a reality show, but it's really a scripted series (I think?) with some kind of horrific element they inserted into the proceedings. I had the same idea, except mine was going to be an actual reality show, and the producers inject a scripted dramatic element with actors and such to fuck with them, a la Fincher's The Game.
That's sort of the premise of that old series The Joe Schmo Show, if I recall.
Sounds more like Scare Tactics to me.
For me it was a retail item. I read the book called Communion by Whitley Strieber in 1987—the time of Mark McGwire breaking the single-season home run record for rookies, the time of Bon Jovi, The Cure, and the surfacing of Rap Music among the very, very white communities.
Anyway, I was 11 years old. The whole tagline "A True Story" had more of an impression on me back then, and the book was fucking terrifying.
At least when I was 11 it was terrifying. Slept in my parent's room for a good year after that, right up to around the time when Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation To Hold Us Back started to take off. That's when I started to stand on my own two feet again.
But beforehand, the one good thing that came from the whole "Communion" experience for me was a simple thought that the Alien motherfucker's face on that book would make for a Great Halloween Costume! Shit, if I had the means, the money and distribution, I seriously would've tried it right then and there. I had that urge.
Mind you, this is before the internet where you didn't know immediately if things were already coming out and when. We had a single Halloween Store in our mall and that was it—I went that year and a couple of more years after and I remember the Freddy Glove being a big deal—but I never saw that Alien costume or mask. I wanted so badly to get it out there.
Few years later of course, those alien masks had invaded the world, but y'all knew how this story was going to end.
Kurzweil is fascinating, he's one part mad scientist and one part real world genius. The Transcendent Man was an awesome illustration of that.
Kurzweil is an endlessly fascinating man. Part of me hopes he's on to something in his book The Singularlity is Near, at least in part, and part of me hopes he isn't.
If he's correct, he basically renders 90 to 95 percent of all science fiction off target in its speculations. That sucks, but it helps to explain the lack of aliens in the stars.
And if he's correct, we're all going to live forever if we survive the next few decades.
I just realize there's no part of me that hopes he's incorrect, even though his wackadoodle timeline is likely way, way off.
Oh, and I invented antibacterial paper towels in my head years before they came on the market. You're welcome.
My Teleport Us story was inspired by the Singularity.
I don't think that I believe in the Singularity, at least not that any of us will live to see. This guy sums up the idea fairly well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09lanier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
I wrote a script treatment while I was in college that was a little similar to SAW. My idea is still way better but alot more complicated and calls for much research. So for now. SAW wins.
There's always room for a SAW XVIII.
There have been a number of little ideas of mine that I've seen someone else do something with, but I can't really say I've seen anything that felt like it was a wholesale duplicate. Most of my ideas are pretty out there, so seeing even a loose copy in many cases would really surprise me. Certainly elements pop up here and there, but rarely anything that seems overly close to the whole. I think authors at the best of times are constantly grabbing from the same or similar sources of inspiration, and it's not so much that any particular idea is original, but more that the confluence of ideas is what ends up being interesting in a more "original" work. And there's always execution, in those rare instances when someone really does something so masterfully that the work itself becomes unique just by virtue of the manner in which it was built.
I had an idea for a movie that was achingly similiar to the movie Irreversible (Which is an amazing fucking movie.)
http://austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/
The link is to a website called - how to steal like an artist. I don't know that I've ever had an original thought, but by the time I put my own spin on it, it morphs into something else.
I look at it a little differently. There is a difference between friends with similar ideas, and an entertainment corporation that uses "high-concept" as an excuse to rip off your ideas.
With the former, you could invite them to a writers group and form a family bond sort of. With Walt Disney, it's just ripping you off blind.
Yes I write children's stories, but also YA.
