moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2025-02-06 02:45 pm
moon_custafer) wrote2025-02-06 02:45 pm
Entry tags:
Writing Quandary
About two days ago a narrative in my head got vivid enough I thought I’d better start writing it down. I might be able to incorporate it into a multi-chapter fic I’ve been working on—it fits with some imagery from earlier chapters and might provide some much-needed backstory. And I don’t want to get side-tracked from the multi-chapter fic, and it’s due a new chapter, and I don’t want to let down myself and the two people reading it.
Howwwwever, the idea is also showing signs of developing into its own stand-alone short story, possibly even something I could try submitting somewhere. I think it’s been a decade since I bothered trying to submit anything anywhere, but I can dream.
The obvious solution would be to write both versions—but I saw a tumblr post a few weeks back by a professional writer whose novel got flagged by her publisher’s anti-plagiarism filter, whereupon she had to explain to her editor that the reason her novel shared a couple sentences with a very sexually -explicit LotR fic posted on Ao3 a couple of years back was because she was the author of both, and had figured those lines were too good not to reuse in her professional work.
I wonder if simply setting the multi-chapter fic to members-only would be enough to keep it from being spotted in the admittedly-unlikely event that I try to get the other version published someday. Both my readers are Ao3 members, so it wouldn’t inconvenience them.
I wonder how often this kind of thing is going to be a problem, now that there’s an option to check for plagiarism by having a computer check every word in a work against everything else findable on the internet? Not to mention the cases that probably exist where a writer didn’t intentionally steal, but did subconsciously recall some turn of phrase from a story they read as a kid…
Howwwwever, the idea is also showing signs of developing into its own stand-alone short story, possibly even something I could try submitting somewhere. I think it’s been a decade since I bothered trying to submit anything anywhere, but I can dream.
The obvious solution would be to write both versions—but I saw a tumblr post a few weeks back by a professional writer whose novel got flagged by her publisher’s anti-plagiarism filter, whereupon she had to explain to her editor that the reason her novel shared a couple sentences with a very sexually -explicit LotR fic posted on Ao3 a couple of years back was because she was the author of both, and had figured those lines were too good not to reuse in her professional work.
I wonder if simply setting the multi-chapter fic to members-only would be enough to keep it from being spotted in the admittedly-unlikely event that I try to get the other version published someday. Both my readers are Ao3 members, so it wouldn’t inconvenience them.
I wonder how often this kind of thing is going to be a problem, now that there’s an option to check for plagiarism by having a computer check every word in a work against everything else findable on the internet? Not to mention the cases that probably exist where a writer didn’t intentionally steal, but did subconsciously recall some turn of phrase from a story they read as a kid…
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It has never been an ethical bar for me to sell poems originally locked on LJ/DW because they are not accessible to the open internet. If you reset the fic to the point where it can't be found in a search crawl, I don't see the problem with excavating it for parts or even reconstituting the entire thing as a professional novella.
(I know a couple of AO3 origfics have translated to traditional publishing, but I have no idea how they did it and therefore have no advice to dispense.)
Not to mention the cases that probably exist where a writer didn’t intentionally steal, but did subconsciously recall some turn of phrase from a story they read as a kid…
I wrote something this year that when I had finished it seemed to have an echo in it, but I couldn't place it and figured someone else would tell me if it were stupidly obvious. (Normally I can spot the echoes for myself.)
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It's so, so common for people to write fanfic and then file off the serial numbers that I don't think an agent would blink if they thought they could sell the story. In fact, it might be a selling point.
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Cassandra Clare famously did. Cassandra Claire Plagiarism debacle - worse? Fans claim that she turned her Draco fic into the best-selling Shadow Hunters series.
And...Fifty Shades of Grey was lifted from an AU fanfic by the same author called Masters of the Universe or something like that.
There's a lot of fanfic writers who became fiction writers - and translated their fic into fiction. It's heavy in the Romantasy or YA Romance Fantasy genre, and the Erotica YA genre.
But if you are the writer of both? I don't see an issue? The novel I published started out as a fanfic (which I didn't share really with anyone outside of LJ and flocked), I just changed it and the characters completely over time.