June 25, 2003

THOSE CRAZY IDEAS

But I Digress...
May 3, 1991

"I hear that writers think all the time, even when they don't want to."

--"CITY OF ANGELS"

Your name is Andy Kaufman. Although you charmed the country in "Taxi," lately your career has taken something of a downswing. Your characterization of the woman-bullying wrestler, an insightful sendup of male machismo--is largely misunderstood by the American public who have come to confuse the performer with the role. A telephone vote has banned you from "Saturday Night Live," one of your most visible arenas. Things are not going well. Sure, you still do a mean Elvis impression, but what makes you tick is messing with people's minds.

And then a thought strikes you--the ultimate gag, a brilliant flimflam.

You fake your death, and start rebuilding. Slowly. Quietly. Doing routines under assumed names, getting back to your roots. Experiment with new comedy, with new ideas, out of the public eye and instead in the blissful quiet. Put the Elvis impression to use by showing up, as Elvis, in K-Marts and Shop-rites, causing a wave of Elvis sightings. And someday, when you return--if you return--you will be applauded as the genius that you are. The scam of the century.

What an idea...

Where do writers get ideas?

They don't get ideas. Ideas come to them.

They come from the newspapers, or books, or TV shows. They come from movies, or friends. They come from happenstances that they witness or hear about second hand.

If I'm making it sound like ideas are a dime a dozen, well...they are. Probably less. It is so darned easy to get ideas if you just set your mind properly.

The key to writing fiction is remembering just how closely linked fiction and reality are. Fiction is just like reality, except it's more elegant. It also makes more sense, unless it's written badly, in which case you've got bad fiction. I like stories that make sense; maybe I'm old-fashioned that way.

The only place where there is a clear-cut division between fiction and non-fiction is on Bestseller lists where, if you come up with enough good ideas and execute them properly, you can wind up.

Execution. That's where it all is. You see, how you tell a story is more important than the idea. A hundred writers can have the same idea, and produce stories involving that idea that are wildly dissimilar. Look at the half-dozen movies that came out a couple years back involving a kid in the body of a man. The only one worth a damn was "Big." Same concept. Better execution.

How you execute a story is the difference between a good story and a bad story (or one good story and a second good story.) It can also be the difference between being "inspired by" a source and plagiarizing a source.

Your name is Margaret Ray. It is the year 1998, and you are happily married to David Letterman, former talk-show host and now network executive. You met him in 1995 and married one year later. Your life has been generally pretty normal.

And then one morning you wake up, and you're not in your Connecticut home. You're in New Jersey. You go back home only to find that no one knows who you are or believes your claims that you're Letterman's wife. Much to your shock, you discover that you've slipped backwards in time nearly a decade.

Everyone assumes you're insane and eventually you're sent to a mental hospital. The Doctors don't believe you, of course...until you calmly detail the events of the Gulf war, months before they occur. Shortly after the end of the war--all as you predicted--the doctors turn their backs and let you "escape." They announce that they're not going treating your escape as such. They're letting you go. Why shouldn't they? You're not crazy.

You return to your birthplace of Colorado, there to hope and pray that someday you're restored to your natural timeline. In the meantime, you rack your brains trying to remember who won the 1991 World Series...

What an idea...

When a writer sees a movie or reads a book, he invariably writes along with the writer of the work. It's automatic. You can't--as the starlet quoted above in the musical "City of Angels" alludes to--shut it off. You analyze the themes being explored, the characterization, the style. And you usually wind up second-guessing, or trying to second-guess, the writer of the work.

Sometimes you anticipate where the writer's going, and sometimes you don't. But you may find that the storyline you've come up with is just as entertaining to you, or even moreso, than what the writer came up with. And from that mental leapfrogging can develop a story.

This is called, "Being inspired by." It's when somebody's work starts the wheels of your mind spinning. It's when you take a concept, or an idea, or a bit of business, and twist it around and transpose it and make it into your own. This takes work.

It is also possible to take the aforementioned concept or idea or bit of business and put it in its entirety in your story. Now it's possible to do this unintentionally. This is called "happenstance."

And if you realize it while there's still time to do something about it, then either you excise it or else acknowledge the source. This is called "honesty."

However, if you do it deliberately, hoping to pull a fast one, that's called "plagiarism," from the Latin root meaning "Kidnapper." To put it mildly, it's frowned upon. To put it unmildly, it's actionable in a court of law.

Have I ever plagiarized something deliberately, with intent to cover it up? Once. I was in sixth grade, stuck for a creative writing piece, and I cobbled a story from a comic book. I carry the guilt with me to this day and have lived in fear for the past two decades that they'll find out and make me repeat elementary school. I hope the principal doesn't read this column.

Your name is classified, but you work in a government lab experimenting with a virus that, when introduced into humans, will cause them to develop psionic powers. At this point, however, it's in the early stages. In fact, all it's doing is breaking down the immune systems of test subjects and killing them. You've still got a long way to go.

However, a screw-up on your part enables the virus to get out into the population, and you are horrified when people start dropping dead. You pray that no one traces the released virus, now called AIDS, to you. In the meantime, however, you are scientifically curious to watch and see if anyone of the affected subjects develops any paranormal abilities.

And then, somebody does.

What an idea...

I occasionally do riffs. Pastiches. This is sort of the opposite of plagiarism. This is a work that so screams of its origin that it's clear there's no intent to defraud. There is, to my mind, a fine line.

In an upcoming two-parter of Hulk, #383-384, I was so involved in a pastiche that I almost crossed that fine line before skittering back. As mentioned before, those two issues are quite clearly a "Phantom of the Opera" riff, with a dollop of "Beauty and the Beast" thrown in (which, in and of itself, is a "Phantom" riff in many ways. Except Phantom is like the original "Beauty and the Beast" and...well, you get the idea.)

Anyway, in the middle of the story, I had a plot element which was central to the second half. And after the story was already drawn, my wife read it and pointed out that it bore a strong--even uncomfortable--resemblance to a sequence in the film "Real Genius." I hadn't been thinking about the movie when I wrote the story, but I realized that she was right. So I worked in an acknowledgement in the dialogue, and was quite satisfied with that. And in acknowledging the source material, however unintended, is skittering safely back across the line.

In a Star Trek Annual a couple years back, I used the concept of telling a story chronologically backward, as Harold Pinter did in his play, "Betrayal." This was deliberate on my part--no accident here--and from the very beginning, it carried the credit line, "From a concept by Harold Pinter." This prompted a number of fans to think that Pinter was writing Trek comics for DC.

Even had I not acknowledged it, the treatments of the idea were so different that it might have slipped past a lot of readers. But when it comes to ideas and execution thereof, it's always better to be safe than sorry.

Besides, it's always embarrassing to have someone point it out before you do. It can have serious legal consequences (an episode of Star Trek comes to mind--and more, if Heinlein had chosen to make a fuss about Tribbles and Martian Flatcats; also there have been actions taken against comic stories from time to time.) It can tarnish your reputation (a reviewer on a computer net has pointed out that a currently-running storyline in a major publication bears an almost scene-by-scene resemblance to the film "Shane," again without acknowledging the source.)

Other works are just one of many sources of ideas. They're just the only source with potential legal ramifications and ethical considerations.

At their most basic, ideas come from the concept of "What if" (yeah, just like the comic.) You look at something that others take for granted, tilt it slightly, and see the possibilities.

One of the masters of this is Roger Stern, whose unused ideas are better than many ideas that see print. My favorite of his is the one in which Peter Parker learns that dear old Uncle Ben was actually a fence, and the burglar that shot him was angry over a transaction gone awry. Now wouldn't that mess with Peter Parker's head? Years of collaring criminals to make up for his uncle getting nailed, and then it turns out his uncle was a criminal, too.

Really, the trick to writing fiction is looking at reality, seeing what's behind it, and going from there.

Your name is Peter David. Your wife is four months pregnant, and you've just gotten back blood test results that tell you the child will not have Downs Syndrome or other ailments.

You joke to your wife, Myra, about how they seem to know so much about children in utero these days. You envision a doctor telling parents, "Congratulations. You're going to have a healthy, eight pound, blue-eyed, black haired, right-handed boy who shows talent for piano and the law. However, unfortunately, further tests indicate he will be a Red Sox fan, doomed to season after season of disappointment and heartbreak."

And as you're cracking wise, Myra looks at you and says, "You know...wouldn't it be interesting in the Marvel universe if they developed a test that indicated whether an unborn child was going to be a mutant or not? And women started considering abortions because there was, say, an 85% chance their child could be a mutant?"

And you realize she's right. You realize story possibilities. And, by a stroke of luck, you're going to be writing "X-Factor." You run it past your editor. He likes it.

What an idea...

Peter David, writer of stuff, hopes to see all and sundry at Long Island's I-CON April 19-21, Oakland's Wondercon April 26-28, and Atlanta's DixieTrek May 10-12. Remember, you heard it here first.

Posted by Glenn Hauman at June 25, 2003 10:59 AM | TrackBack | Other blogs commenting
Comments
Posted by: Simon DelMonte at June 25, 2003 11:44 AM

So, did PAD ever do that story in X-Factor? I wasn't following it then (or since the first six issues by Layton, actually).

I miss Roger Stern's regular presence - my favorite Superman writer my favorite Spider-Man writer - but I'm kind of glad he never did that story. I like certian characters untainted, and I think Uncle Ben should be one. And as odd as doing a teen sex comedy with Ben Parker seems, such a thing doesn't really harm the character as we knew him, any more than learning Giles was once a jerk as a teen. (Yes, I am forgetting the Peter Bagge version of this idea from last year, but I skipped it and heard mediocre reviews.)

Posted by: Corey Tacker at June 25, 2003 12:19 PM

"So, did PAD ever do that story in X-Factor?"

He did, but from what I remember from a later BID column, Marvel demanded it be heavily edited and the final result was nearly incomprehesible, and I believe the abortion angle was completely gone. It was one of the reasons PAD quit X-Factor, IIRC.

Corey

Posted by: Luigi Novi at June 25, 2003 01:31 PM

Peter David: Anyway, in the middle of the story, I had a plot element which was central to the second half. And after the story was already drawn, my wife read it and pointed out that it bore a strong--even uncomfortable--resemblance to a sequence in the film "Real Genius." I hadn't been thinking about the movie when I wrote the story, but I realized that she was right.

Luigi Novi: I particularly enjoyed the part where the Hulk admonished the Abomination to "quit wacking off."

Posted by: Will at June 25, 2003 03:37 PM

I asked about the abortion storyline during an X-Men panel discussion at a summer convention after the column appeared in CBG. Someone, I think it was Bob Harras, laughed and something like "Oh yeah, we're going to do an abortion story" and mocked the idea itself. I was annoyed that he would just shoot down PAD's idea like that. I thought it would have made some for some interesting stories, a step up from the basic "the world hates us because we're different" stories that all seemed so repetitive.

Posted by: Jim Clarke at June 25, 2003 09:00 PM

I at best borrowed heavily (at worst plagarized) a creative writing story in the 6th grade! The guilt has been nearly unbearable. I totally ripped off a Mad Magazine parody (I changed it pretty heavily, but not enough). It was so very lame of me, but I'd waited until the last minute to do it...

Damn. I thought I'd feel better getting this off my chest, but I don't. Stupid guilt.

Posted by: Hollie at June 25, 2003 10:15 PM

On the topic of homage, inspiration, and plagarism, I've thought since the very first second that Freakazoid was something that would be helping line MD Allred's nest egg. I was very surprised to be unable to find his name anywhere (on IMDB, at least). Is there any story behind this?

Posted by: Luigi Novi at June 25, 2003 11:55 PM

Peter, there's something I've always wondered: You've stated a couple of times that the story that saw print in X-Factor bore no resemblance to the story you originally wrote. If that's true, would you consider trying to publish the story in a different format or venue, perhaps in a backup story or one-shot in either the X-Books or another book? Since the what was published didn't resemble the original script, is it different enough that it wouldn't be repititious? I'd like to read it.

Posted by: John C. Kirk at June 26, 2003 07:18 AM

Interesting thing - I first read this column (in the BID paperback) before I read the "Psi-Man" novels, and it's only having re-read Psi-Man recently that I made the connection (the AIDS-like virus causing psychic powers).

Posted by: Rob R. at June 26, 2003 09:54 AM

Great article.

I was in 7th grade when I had my first bout with plagarism. The plagarism won, as I was on a deadline for a creative writing story. So I took a story out of a Vault of Horror reprint. I don't regret it, because I plagarized it horribly (trust me, it's more of a visual story than a text one), and I got a horrible grade on it. I deserved it.

Funny thing happened about a year ago. I write research articles, and as I was having a meeting with my boss (not my immediate boss (editor), but the director of our agency) about my current project. He pulled out a book, told me to copy the first chapter out of it, and he was going to enter it into a contest...sponsored by the people who put out the book I was supposed to plagarize. I told him I wouldn't feel comfortable plagarizing that, and once he heard that word, totally tried to back track.

A few months later I was writing an article on Smallpox and the same guy called me in his office where he had a term paper website on his screen. He was talking about downloading a paper on Smallpox so I could copy it. He couldn't understand that a) the preview they show you on the site is just that, a preview, and he'd have to pay for the rest of the article, and b) IT'S STILL PLAGARISM!! Sigh.

Now that I think about it, if he keeps wanting me to plagarize, what does that say about what he thinks about my work? I'm glad I'm looking for another job.

Rob R.

Posted by: JasonP at June 26, 2003 06:01 PM

Yeah, I like those Real Genius references also! :)

On the wall of my cubicle, I've got that splash page from TIH 390 with Hulk in the bunny slippers, with a word-balloon created by co-worker above it, reading, "May I say, Sir, I admire your taste in footwear."

Still makes me smile to look at.

Posted by: Leto at June 27, 2003 06:26 AM

Why did this abortion thing never cross my mind? I don't know if this issue got published in France (if so, then I'm ashamed to have missed it), but as I read this post, it just seemed the most logical idea.

Living in a world where mutants can do so much rampage, and carry leathal viruses, any mother would want to know (except the piano-genius part of course).

How can any editor miss such an opportunity to add to his universe such a concept?

PS: last week, I read once again the "Keown run" on the Hulk (for a radiophonic review), and I must admit that PAD should be sitting in the Pantheon of living comics writters. Maybe he could even make his british fellows giggle a bit...

Posted by: John at June 27, 2003 11:18 AM

Just wanted to mention that Kaufman and Hart, in the original Merrily We Roll Along, the play the muscial was based on, got there before Pinter. (I'd bet someone got there before K&H too; there are no new ideas, of course)

Posted by: Zhen Dil Oloth at June 27, 2003 02:58 PM

Guess I should start writing my "original" idea of the Ten Commandments with Moses as a woman.

I will make millions. ;)

Posted by: Pete Wiggins at July 8, 2003 04:54 AM

I've wanted to write all my life. I was also plagarising stuff all my life. Badly.

Now I'm starting to write something original (which I'm not telling you about). Also, in addition to writing fiction, I'm also indulging my poetic side by writing, strangely enough, poetry. I just finished my first poem, and I've showed it to a few people, and they think it's good.

I'd also like to say that Peter David is my idol and inspiration. The Powers-That-Be at Marvel who fired him from Hulk when he refused to let them impose their idea for a "new" direction on him, were smoking something.