Writer problems: pseudoplagiaphobia

I vividly remember my first college class with a research paper as part of the requirements. A few weeks into the course, a day was set aside for us all to announce out loud what subject we had chosen and the outline of the paper we planned. It was very important to me that I be the first to present my planned paper. Why? Because I was certain that the idea I'd landed on was so good it would be obvious to everyone else, and if I didn't present it before everyone else got a chance, three other students would announce they were doing versions of the same thing.

After a few semesters, I finally realized that I was older than most of the others students, had spent time in the Marine Corps, and was therefore a lot more serious about going to college than nearly everyone. Which meant that nobody was stealing any of my ideas. In fact, they usually showed up to class on the day we were supposed to announce our topics without any idea at all what they were going to write about. In other words, my fears that just because something had occurred to me meant it would occur to others were almost always groundless. I got over pseudoplagiaphobia, the fear of falsely appearing to have stolen an idea from someone when I was merely the victim of having had the same idea as someone else. (Side note: a quick Google search tells me I might be the first to coin this word, but I'm sure a more industrious researcher might tell me I'm wrong.)

It's a whole other story writing fiction, however. In college, I only had to worry about whether someone else in my class would happen to have the same idea as me, and the odds of that were pretty long. But when I'm writing something where the potential audience includes the whole world, there's a much bigger pool of other writers to worry about having had "my" idea first. Worse, there's no possible way to investigate the collected writings of all humanity in order to know if anyone ever did something similar enough to what I've done that I might be accused of stealing it. I could check for titles, of course, but generally, I already know whether my title is sui generis without having to check, and that's not really what I was worried about, anyway. Repeating a title isn't a big deal, but repeating a story--or coming close to repeating a story--is. With the whole world to worry about, the odds I'll stumble into something someone else wrote become a lot higher.

This doesn't usually bother me, but it did bother me over the last few months when I, probably like a lot of other writers, was pushing my way through my COVID-19 novel. (I mean I wrote it during my free time I got as a result of COVID-19, not that it's about the disease.) The novel started out as one thing, but it pretty quickly morphed into something else, and when it changed, I suddenly knew where I wanted to go with it. The change was something I was really happy with, but about halfway through writing, I started thinking that surely, someone else had done something similar at some point, because if it occurred to me like that, it must have occurred to someone else.

Like the thing pseudoplagiaphobia itself worries about, there's probably nothing new about an obsession over whether your idea is really new. The best advice I can give to you if you're suffering from it is that if you've been writing long enough or if you're talented enough that people might actually read your work, then you're going to have a style unique enough that even if you do happen to stumble into the same plot points or character sketches as someone else, it's still going to feel pretty solidly your own.

The professor in one of those classes from my undergraduate years later became a friend of mine. He once was talking about how early 20th century writers were struggling with trying to find something new to say, and in an off-handed way, he threw out this line: "The Barenaked Ladies sang 'It's All Been Done,' and even that was already done a hundred years ago." The good news about the impossibility of coming up with something truly novel is that people are fairly forgiving about ideas with a lot of overlap. Hell, Moulin Rouge came out barely two years after Shakespeare in Love, and even though the second was nearly a transposition of the first to a different era and visual aesthetic, people gave both a ton of awards. (And if memory serves, that was also about the same time Hollywood found that yes, America did have room in its heart for two separate disaster flicks about an asteroid hitting Earth.)

It's true that in a very big world with a lot of talented people writing fiction just like you are, there's bound to be somebody who did something like what you did. If you're really unlucky, there might be a story out there that's a lot like yours, and you won't find out until you've published your own work. That's not really a reason to write in fear, though. You're as likely to end up with readers finding the two works to be in conversation with each other as you are to be accused of stealing an idea you didn't even know existed before you. If that happens, it's probably a good thing. Teachers love assignments that force students to compare and contrast, and if you've got something that forms a Venn diagram with another story, you might just end up being on somebody's syllabus.

You can probably rest easy that if you read a reasonable amount and write well enough to find a readership that you don't need to spend years making sure nobody already did what you are doing.

(Now, that being said, here are two things I've discovered you will have a very, very difficult time not repeating: coffee shop names and craft beer names. Seriously, I've had to put these in stories before, and I've spent hours coming up with one clever--or so I thought--idea after another only to find that yep, some guy in Des Moines already has a coffee shop by that name or there's a brewery in Michigan making that very beer. If you need to put a coffee shop or a craft beer in your story, it's best to just kiss the idea of being clever good-bye. I'd recommend having the owner of the cafe or the creator of the beer commiserating over how hard it is to come up with a new name, because it really is.)