Always worried about their works constitute plagiarism

In order to prevent plagiarism, I even carefully check every detail I write.Because I think plagiarism is terrible, and may even be the end of a writer's career.It worries me not only about the legal consequences, but also the condemnation of my conscience. Do you have any solutions?

 

I'm worried about what to do by accident, just like Helen Keller's "frost Fairy" incident

 

This is worth thinking about

 

Cryptomnesia is a real thing, but is rare, and unless you have something close to an eidetic memory, I wouldn't worry about it. Even if you do, there isn't much you can do about it except make an inventory of every media you've ever consumed, and if something you write seems similar, flag it and later review it and compare to similar scenes in media you've read or viewed.

Look at the similarities between The Inheritance Cycle (Eragon) and Lord of the Rings. Those Eragon books were still successful, although that wasn't word for word passages, just character names, geography, etc.

I will admit, this is something that sometimes worries me, I like to think that I have a decent memory of past events, and the thought of finding something that I write was really unconsciously lifted from another source can be frightening. Of course, I also worry that anything I write will be trash, but those are almost mutually exclusive concerns: if something was unconsciously taken from a notable work, it probably won't suck.

The 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life' case really concerned me when I first read about it. Most concluded that it was 100% plagiarism due to the numerous passages that were almost word for word copies (and from works from the same genre that she had read a few years prior), but I tend to plays devil's advocate, and also, I tend to think that most people are rational. It just didn't make sense that someone smart enough to get into Harvard would risk a $500,000 two book deal (some reports say she only got $250,000, the rest shared by her book packager) by blatant plagiarism. She claimed, of course, cryptomnesia. But after watching her interview, I've concluded that it either was intentional plagiarism, maybe driven by the stress to fulfill the contract as well as her parent's higher education expectations, or at the least that she is hiding something and the plagiarism was committed by an editor or ghostwriter, but that's off topic. Plus, the Q.R. Markham case shows that seemingly rational people can try to pull a fast one and intentionally include ridiculous amounts of word for word plagiarism in a single book. So it is possible that some can slip by editors and publishers, but I'm sure people in the industry are a lot more vigilant these days due to the two cases noted above.

Only thing you can do is write with your own voice. Worst case, some of the stuff you've read will inspire you but that's not plagiarism.

 

I think it's something we all feel anxious or scared about to varying degrees. But, as others have said, try not to worry to0 much...or at all as long as you aren't deliberately using others' published words.

Unless you're writing the same kind of story in the same genre and clearly lifting phrases from a well-known published work, I'm sure you're fine. I worry about this very thing myself and then try to remind myself of that.

And even if, you can spin/rearrange/re-tell/make new what is already out there. Borrowing an idea is fine as long as you make the actual story your own. I just did this with a collection of non-fiction essays about baseball. Most of them of course have been written about a million times before, (hence my source/reference material) but I painted them all in a different, personal, interpretation and style.

 

In U.S. law, the idea of "subconscious copying" in copyright infringement goes back to the 1920s. There have been some high-profile cases of infringement of music based on subconscious copying but it is not commonplace. As said above, so long as you aren't directly copying someone you are most likely going to be fine. If you truly independently create something, it doesn't matter how close it is to another work (at least from a legal standpoint in the U.S., because copyright does not protect against independent creation).

 

I am a fan of postmodern ideas on the text and its structure. It seems to me that our whole world is really hypertext and every our word, every sentence that we write refers us to another author, to another work, philosophy, and so on. It is very important to understand that one way or another we copy ideas from each other, combine them, change the configuration and meaning of words, and we get "our" text, which in fact is not ours, but is the heritage of all mankind throughout its history.

 

To a certain extent, plagiarism happens all the time. How many books have you read, songs you've heard, which are very similar to what you've read or heard before? The only thing that has changed in many cases is the exact words.

 

Plagiarism is copying from one source.

Research is copying from two.

 

The only solution guaranteed to prevent a writer from committing plagiarism or copyright infringement is to not write.

King Solomon, credited with writing the Hebrew text of Ecclesiastes in the mid 10th century, BC, said it best, "What has been will be again, / what has been done will be done again; / there is nothing new under the sun." One might wonder where he stumbled upon that idea.

Everything an author writes is inspired by something in their life, often by the prose of other writers. There are few new ideas for writing, but many fresh approaches to the same tired old tropes.

Being concerned about plagiarism is good, but obsessing over it might be a stumbling block too difficult to bypass. Good luck.

 

Most plagiarists get caught cause they hijack entire paragraphs and then tend to write in the same genre allowing canny readers to spot the ripoffs.
Borrowing ideas is not plagiarism. Being inspired by other works isn't plagiarism. If this was so there would be no such thing as trends or genres or sub genres and the entire library of gothic romance could be wiped out.
Just write your story. Writing and finishing is hard enough without getting hung up on endless worries.

 

Exactly this.

And not just gothic romance, but also most horror and especially fantasy/adventure. Read anything in that genre and it's obviously all derived from Tolkien. If that estate really wanted to, they could probably have 623948234234898 lawsuits on the books by tomorrow

 

Clearly not true if you've done any breadth of reading in the genre, though certainly earlier works of epic fantasy tended to draw very heavily on Tolkien, as did a lot of D&D-related fiction.

 

I should have disclaimer'd my post Truthfully no, I have not read much in the genre aside from a handful of AD&D novels and some other standalone works. So I stand corrected. But of that tiny sample size I have read, much of it is Tolkien-inspired.

 

There is certainly a lot of Tolkien-derived work out there. Way too much of it in my view, though some is better than others. But there’s a lot of good work in fantasy as well that doesn’t follow those traditions. But yeah, often the popular stuff is like Tolkien, D&D, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones etc.