Q: Have I plagiarized myself?
A: I don’t think so. At least, I haven’t done that on purpose.
Q: Do you ever reuse phrases or expressions?
A: Good grief, yes. In fact, I find it very difficult not to. As many others here have said, you get certain phrases or expressions you like and they end up in your work over and over. Most of the time it isn’t obvious until after the fact.
Now, as far as using ideas or phrases from other authors. I try very hard to avoid that, but sometimes it sneaks up on you. For example, after I finished “The Return of Ultra Woman” I realized that certain elements of Lois’s press conference when she’s talking about Superman sounded disturbingly similar to how Lois talks about Clark to Superman at the end of Wendy’s “It Happened One Super Night.” I know that no copying was involved, but since then I’ve tried even harder to avoid similarities to existing works.
One thing that I did deliberately in “RoUW” was a sideways reference to another story. At one point Lois and Clark were discussing wearing wedding rings and I had Clark mention that he once appeared as Superman wearing his wedding ring but was fortunate that no one noticed. This was intended as a tip-of-the-hat to “A Ring on His Finger” (by Wendy again) where this happened and it WAS noticed.
I guess my opinion would be that the LnC universe is a small one and since thousands of stories have been written, it’s likely that anything you can think of to say and any way you can say it will probably closely resemble something that is already out there. My goal is to do my best to have the core story elements be uniquely mine and then simply try to not be too similar to any phrases or micro-elements that may exist in another work whether it be my own or the work of some other author.
Bob
