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.
I once named a character in a story and thought no more about it. Until, several years later, I watched a rerun of Woody Allan's Sleeper on late night TV and was horrified to realise that this was where my subconscious had gotten the name from.
This was a movie that I'd seen once, two or three years before I wrote the story and the character name appears in the movie for precisely 2.5 seconds, mentioned only once, in passing.
Since then, I've become very wary of character names that just pop into my head full blown and often mix and match names, just to be extra sure that my subconscious isn't playing tricks on me again!
LabRat
