(no subject)

[sorcyress]

One of the things I have always known as a writer is that I steal from others works, unashamedly and unabashedly.

I don't steal words, per se, but ideas, and concepts and pairings and characters --near all whom I write have been touched by another authour, save perhaps my Vegetables¹ and a few of the school-stories.

I don't especially believe that this is a particularly bad thing, most especially since, the longer I have a world to shape, the more I shape it to be my own, and not just something stolen for me to play in. But everything I read (and to a lesser extent, watch) touches off a sequence of ideas, and gives me a starter for something else to make.

The most recent rip-off started very very obvious²: I want to write interactions between a priest and a whore, preferably two who are rather forced together. The sword and sorcery pairing is ubiquitous in modern fantasy, (Tarma and Kethry³, I send my love to thee) somehow I feel the priest and whore -albeit perhaps more subtle- should show just as frequent.

(Would his Lordship Christ and the Lady Magdalene count, do you think?)

But yes. Is lovely fun to watch characters breathe life --starting as just the mere concept, of a wandering priest and a traveling whore, then moving to find how and why their lives should intersect. Neither has a name quite yet, but I begin to see images --the warrior priest, in crisp white, with unruly dark hair to his shoulders, and eyes like ice and ocean, and the Queen of the underworld, clad in all colours under the sun, with stolen breeches, and baubles dripping off her arms and neck.

They call each other brother and sister, hissing the words with hatred. It is a rare thing to be born with a Companion, two people with a matching pattern of spotty pigmentation circling their wrist, but not so rare that neither had heard it. And of course, it is expected, once you are of an age, to go searching, letting the draw of your heart drag you closer to that match, the other half of your perfect pair.

We'll see what happens with them. And it will be nice to watch, as these two clearly stolen become instead something that is clearly my own.

~Sor
MOOP!

¹The Grand Adventures of Eric and Tom has been a webcomic I've wanted to write for at *least* four years. The main character is a tomato named Eric, and a tiki named Tom. There's also a stick figure called TSFWD (That Stick Figure Waiter Dude, no I am not creative with names shut up!) and an occasionally mindless carrot called Shelly.

2: Obvious, at least, to those who've read some of the Kushiel books, and will understand when I say I've just finished Kushiel's Dart.

3: From Mercedes Lackey's "Oathbound, Oathbreakers, Oathblood" trilogy, and a pair of lovely female heroines who actually got their *start* in a series of anthologies entitled "Sword and Sorcery". They're *wonderful*

Comments

[harena.livejournal.com]

Oooooh, that looks to be a loverly story! i can't wait to seeee iiiiit!

And pish-posh, concepts have been "borrowed" since forever.. most of today's freaking fantasy is completely set from the standard that Tolkien set, for example, so i wouldn't worry about that.

*sits waiting expectantly for story right up until she gets distracted & forgets*

[mrs-pansy.livejournal.com]

Well, we don't live in a vacuum (I suppose that in of it itself might make a good story, a person who lives in a vacuum), plus there are no new ideas... so, one MUST "steal" from others to write anything. Taking some established characters or storylines and imagining "what if..." is the start of a heck of a lot of really good writing, so go for it!

[marcmagus]

There's a wonderful short story titled "The Solipsist" [I don't know the author; read it in one of the more awesome moments of a high-school English class] which is sort of about a person who lives in a vacuum.

Unless you meant a person who lives in a vacuum cleaner, who might want to get to know the woman who lives in a shoe, and whose adventures might be really fun.

[kugelblitz.livejournal.com]

Why not make the whore male? And the priest a female?

[erikakaiser.livejournal.com]

I would read that. Like, constantly.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

That's the other one I've been tossing around in the back of my mind, tied in with the fact that I really want to write a strong celibate female role (partially due to Kushiel, and partly because I think it'd be fun to write.)

As it currently stands, the drabble has them as a wandering male warrior-priest and a female queen of the street ruffians sneakthief-whore. Nothing says I have to only write one version of the same story --hell, I've written multiple versions in tandem *before* (albeit with less difference than swapped gender)

~Sor

[erikakaiser.livejournal.com]

Honestly I think that's how writing works. You see something, you steal it, and if you're a good writer or a writer who's really going to go anywhere, you make it your own. There is nothing new under the sun, and even saying that is a stereotype.

Hell, I can trace most of my characters back to an original stolen idea, or at the very least the stolen typeset for what character was popular at the time (for instance, I made Janus during the rise of the Angsty Mercenaries With Nondescript Dark Pasts That Have Left them Angry, Bad-Ass, and Wandering).

It's all about how you handle it.

(Or at least that's what I like to tell myself so I feel like less of a hack!)

[thorog.livejournal.com]

There is nothing in the gospels that says Mary Magdelene was a whore, afair.

If you wanted to write something that is completely original you would have to ignore everything ever written. It's much easier to consciously draw elements from more than one work. This is called "research". Hell, in academia there's a whole area of work consisting of reviewing - gathering together everyone's work in a particular field and saying "this is what's been done". These people write hundred- (or more!) page reviews, and get their photos on the front page of the article (which is more than you get for most papers).

Of course, in fiction you can't just cite previous works, so you have to work in homages or allusions to previous works. "Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis" etc.

The best way, I think, to repeat a literary meme (has this term ever been used? I'm using this term now) is either to give the barest essentials to the reader so that they recognise it, and let them imply the rest of it, or to subvert it. Your example - the opposing pair. You run them on a scale of virtue, but I've seen the same run with brawn (Conan often adventures with a thief or a young woman...in this way you have the scale of masculinity/femininity as well), morality (Caramon and Raistlin Majere from the Dragonlance series). Now, we assume when you say a priest and a whore that the priest is male, the whore is female. Maybe this isn't the case (as kugelblitz suggests). Maybe it turns out that the priest is actually corruptible, while the whore is their moral compass*. This could venture very close to romanticising or glorifying whoredom though, if you don't watch out.

--
*Not riffing off real life or anything at all here.

[elvenyukiryu.livejournal.com]

Mercedes Lackey is full of WIN.

That being said, most of my stories are immediately derived from dreams. With the exception of the novel I'm writing right now which is based on a character from a work of art my friend made and was conceived completely in the bathroom.

Like the priest/whore idea... kind of like the assassin/religious nut pairing in the Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks (we recommend highly). My favorite part is the Companion bit. That is what draws me in. :)