When someone steals your idea (before you thought of the idea...)

Just wondering, how best should you deal with someone uses a time machine to steal your ideas... by which of course i mean you have an amazing idea and then read something and realise someone else has done it.

How much can you get away with? My W.I.P. contains a race full of people with Giant Flyer and so their castles are on top of mountains, and so i called them eyries... then read A Game OF Thrones and discovered Martin had named a very similar castle, The Eyrie. Could I get away with that? I have lots of other little annoying time-travel-stolen ideas to a similar degree of sameness, not just that one (most annoyingly is when it's something you steal from history but someone else got there first...), but how best does one deal with it? change their own? hope no one notices? get rid of their own?

edited 14th Jun '13 6:58:32 AM by VincentQuill

Eh might want to change the name, but convergent ideas aren't really something to worry about.

Someone totally stole my idea for a character called Professor Layton. Not with a time machine, though - I came up with it back in 2002.

Change the name and you'll be fine. Or just say it's an homage

edited 15th Jun '13 1:20:20 PM by WSM

Or just leave it be. Coincidental plagiarism is not illegal.

It may not be illegal, but I would rather avoid it. What's really annoying is that an eyrie is just a word for an eagle/hawk's nest, not his word, and it fits my w.i.p. better because they are used by people on giant hawks , but it's unfortunately a rather obscure word so people will think I got it from him.

Honestly, that sounds like Fan Myopia at work. As you note, it's a real word, and I strongly doubt GRRM was the first person to use it as a fantasy place-name.

It's the fan myopia that I'm worried about. Common linguistic/historical/mythical roots with lots of authors can make them seem remarkably similar, e.g. The dothraki in a game of thrones drink clotted mare's milk, much like real world Mongols, and of course my Mongol-based culture has fermented mare's milk too... There's just an awful lot of real world things that I want to use but it turned out that someone else got there first... It's rather infuriating. When should you change it and when should you just hope people realise it wasn't an original idea by the other author?

These all sound like unimportant details to me — especially the mare's milk one. Stop worrying about it and just write the thing.

Unless your story is about Filber Braggins, nephew of Burbler Braggins, going on a quest with a small band of allies into the heart of the the dark land of Gordo to throw the magical Necklace of Evil into a volcano, and his friend Bindolf the Brown dies a third of the way through the story (only to come back later because lol he's a wizard); nobody will care if some elements of your story are the same as an already-existing story.

Even then, if you pull it off well enough then nobody will even care about really important similarities. Many of Shakespeare's plays were base upon existing stories.

I suppose, but there is an awful lot of overlapping details. This is only going to be self-published on the kindle store (cheap, and they publish anything regardless of quality or size of target market), so it's not as if a lot of people will be drawing comparisons anyway.

My general writing principle with most fan-related tropes is "treat your audience fairly, but don't cater to morons". Anyone who honestly is going to accuse you of plagiarism (or just "ripoffs") over Fan Myopia falls into that latter category.

edited 16th Jun '13 7:56:13 PM by nrjxll