unkownwriter said:
I think it's different for academic circles, possibly even for nonfiction writers. The idea is often more focused, with research that supports it. With that amount of specific detail, someone else coming up with it might very well be theft. But in fiction, ideas are often nebulous, or bits and pieces of things we've read, seen, played in a game. More of a general spark than something that an academic career hinges on.
Yeah, I think that's right. And there are ideas in scholarship that are basically the equivalent of tropes. I mean, you can locate and credit the person responsible for a recent specific idea being used in literary scholarship, such as the
lesbian continuum (Adrienne Rich), but what about the more general idea that stories often have a
subtext? The origins of the latter idea are lost in the mists of time, even though it's a pretty foundational concept for the whole field.
Rob Martin said:
I published my thesis twenty(cough) years ago. It was a study on tracking the expansion and contraction of the Roman empire through the systematic production of beer. Basically an agricultural study. I did significant research (and still love beer), presented and defended it. Got my degree and moved on. Around a decade ago, I was contacted by the college and informed that they believed a student may have "plagiarized" a section of my work. I reviewed what they sent me, and in the end, I decided the student's work (Agricultural Expansionism in Eastern Europe) was sufficiently different and no plagiarism actually occurred.
Interesting that they chose to let you decide whether or not you'd been plagiarized. I've never taught in a significant graduate program, so it's interesting to hear how such accusations are handled at that level. Also, your research sounds totally cool.
Rob Martin said:
Academia takes this stuff seriously because careers have been made and lost on ideas. The open press, not so much. Shelly wasn't the first person to write about a monster created by man (look at the Golem for example). And the vampire existed in tales long before Dracula. It's the way they're written and presented that makes them unique. Even J.K. Rowling can't deny that books about magic schools and young wizards existed before she wrote her series. One of the things I do when bored and in front of a computer is to wander over to Writer's Digest. They have a daily writing prompt and I love to see how many different shorts are posted about it. Some are bland and others are a blast, but they all use the same idea as a starting point.
Yeah, agreed. These sorts of ideas are totally fair game, and tropes can become very specific, IMO, and still be fair game. But I do think the academic approach to plagiarism exerts a formative pressure on how people tend to think of the word -- on their general assumptions about the term. Go to any dictionary, and you see it:
"the practice of taking someone else's work
or ideas and passing them off as one's own" (Google)
"to steal and pass off (
the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source" (Merriam-Webster)
"an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language
and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author" (Dictionary.com)
"the process or practice of using another person's
ideas or work and pretending that it is your own" (Cambridge)
My point is just that when newer authors have that "OMG my idea was stolen!" reaction, it's not coming entirely out of the blue. They've probably heard plagiarism talked about as
the theft of words or ideas on many occasions, thanks to that academia-derived definition, so they feel their ideas should belong solely to them, just as their words do. They may not even realize how tropey their own ideas are. Tropes are sneaky that way. I mean, in urban fantasy, it might just
feel right that your MC is a too-brave-for-her-own-good, not-classically-beautiful-but-somehow-very-attractive leatherclad woman in her 20s with a hard-luck past that's given her a deep-seated fear of commitment who hides her inner marshmallow with a heavy dose of snark and relies on her annoying but helpful supernatural pet while waving around her blade, which may have a name... but really the genre is working you like a marionette. And more power to it: I love those stories. Tropes become tropes because people like them.
