You know how sometimes when you're writing something you run out of ways to describe something or you run out of clever lines for someone to say? Have you ever found yourself in a situation wherein you lifted something from an old fic you wrote and used it again?

What line or image did you lift and on which fics did you use them on?

I'm still too young in the fandom to have lifted something from one of my own fics to reuse, but i gotta admit that in Japanese animation, i sometimes end up using something i've written before, but only in part, when i really can't think of a way to describe something.

I'm just curious if I'm the only one who's done this before or not. If I'm alone in this, then great.

I haven't written enough fiction yet for this even to be a possibility.

In my nonfiction writing I have occasionally cited my prior works; but it is more common for me to paraphrase or summarize what I had written earlier.

FWIW, I have been trying to catch up on the earlier fanfic. I had started out planning to read all the Kerth winning and nominated stories, but I have been sidetracked into reading all the works of some authors whose works I especially enjoy. I have noticed that some (I won't name names) have used plotlines and/or descriptive phrases repeatedly. It becomes a lot more obvious when one reads an author's works back-to-back. So to judge by the fanfic I have read, you are not alone.

Joy,
Lynn

There's one I've use a variation on few times. The original was:

"I hadn't planned on telling Sam an alien was doing his daughter."

[Originally from Unanswered Prayers in which a married Lois and Clark are contemplating telling Sam about Clark's Kryptonianness.]

I'm certain there are others I've reused either intentionally or not, but that's the only one that immediately comes to mind.

Carol

@Lynn: good to know. :p i've written quite a lot for Japanese animation, and yeah, i end up paraphrasing, but because *I* know I lifted it from something else i wrote, I feel like I'm plagiarising. lol.

I do think there's a difference between doing it consciously and unconsciously though. Neither is wrong, I've done both in the past myself, but I think the type of thing you're describing Lynn is often done subconsciously without the author noticing it, rather than being a conscious choice to reuse material.

I know that I have a very bad habit of getting a favourite phrase or word into my head and then using it more than once until I have to stop myself. There was a phase during some of my very early writing when every one of my heroines happened to have whiskey-coloured eyes.

It's often difficult to notice you're doing it when you're the one doing the writing, simply because you're too close to it. It's usually, as you say, Lynn, clearer when you read a few stories back to back.

But it's not just fanfic. I've seen the same thing occur time and again in novels - again, its especially noticeable when you read a series back to back, rather than over the years.


LabRat

@Labrat: ooh, I love that! "Whiskey-colored eyes".

I do my best not to copy myself, but it happens before i know it, just like you said, Labrat.

No arguments here, LabRat! If I gave the impression that I thought that the authors had been deliberately copying from their earlier works, I apologize. I had not meant to ascribe any sort of intentionality to the authors' actions, merely to point out the results thereof.

edit: I'll also say that, while I'm not too worried about plagiarizing myself, I am petrified that I might unwittingly plagiarize another author...That I'll have read another piece of fanfic, then at some future point seemingly get a new idea for a story without realizing that I am in fact remembering another author's work. I suppose the solution to this would be not to read any more fanfic, but that strikes me as a bit draconian. Does anyone else have this fear? If so, what do you do about it?

Joy,
Lynn

Oh, I think most of us do, Lynn. And I imagine that as a newer author, with more stories out there than I ever had to contend with, it's even more of an issue.

I've known certain authors who refused to read stories with the same theme as a WIP they were working on...just in case.

As you say, it's a difficult paradox. If you avoid reading fanfic in order to avoid the issue, you cut yourself off from a lot of fun.

I don't think there is a solution. I think you just have to wing it and hope for the best really. Beta readers can come in useful here - often pointing out a similarity you've failed to notice. But I'm not sure you can do much else about the risk.

Although, maybe others have found a solution.

LabRat

Well, that kind of thing happens to me all the time: I get a favorite expression into my head and just have to recycle it time and again. It doesn't even have to be my own, and that's probably pretty bad.

I know I also used this consciously as a kind of kudos to one author or other. I definitely re-used Ann's claim about the Bat Mobile being always around the corner, for instance. I know I commented on that phrase, and I also used it at a later time somewhere. (If only I remembered where...) Honestly, it was meant as an inside joke, not as a try ot make my writing better by plagiarising.

What I would never do, though, is quote whole passages of another person's work.

No need, Lynn. I know that authors do intentionally recycle their own material now and then. And there's nothing wrong with that.

No, I just think that what you and Sayo are describing are two different things. There's the intentional recycling and the unintentional, subconscious reuse of material that we don't even notice we're doing.

LabRat

Actually I think it is quite common for a writer to use and reuse certain phrases and images. This is especially true if you've written several fics. If you've come upon a particular turn of phrase that you like you tend to reuse it instinctively. This is probably most common in descriptions. After all there are only so many ways to describe the color brown.

I don't think it is a good or bad thing in and of itself but one does have to be careful not to use certain descriptive phrases over and over within the same fic.

Tank (who has always had a hard time coming up with different ways to describe a Lois haircut)

Just remember

Forget about copying between stories. Heck, I can use the same phrase or concept twice in the same paragraph!

Actually, though, it's easy to use the same concept in two different stories without remembering that you used that concept before - especially when you've been writing stories for ten years.

ML (who suddenly feels very old )

Yes, I repeat myself all the time. I notice it when I re-read and go over the fic, and then I have to edit it out and make a change.

Sometimes I miss the repeats. Will count on beta reader for that.

LabRat

Speaking of unintentional borrowing, I suppose if one would seriously look closely AKA nitpick at most of my LnC works you'd find at least a sentence (sometimes even a paragraph) or two that are similar to (or convey similar message) a few of my favorite earlier fanfics by wonderful authors like When Friends become Lovers, Walk in my Shoes, Happy New Tears, Faux Pas, Epiphany, Poison, Momentum, AKA Clark Kent, Rest and Reproduction... and so on.

I just can't seem to help it since I've read these stories so many times and certain dialogues have just stickied themselves inside my brain. Besides, there's definitely a limit on what characteristics I can bestow upon my Clark Kent or Lois Lane and these great authors have touched me in some way or the other that I end up writing something that's already been written because that's exactly how I want my story to go and there's just no other way around it!

And so, it is inevitable that I end up copying even myself time and again because I just don't know how to write a different story!

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

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

Tank said:
Is that brown brown? Dull, insipid, *mud* brown? Or brown the shade of the smoothest milk chocolate, brown?


Anyhoo, to the question at hand. I know I've repeated a phrase in more than one story. It happens most frequently when I'm working on more than one story at a time. Either I'm taking a break from a longer story or something in the longer piece sparks the idea for the second, but I often find myself putting a similar phrase in both. In fact, it might be the phrase itself that spawns the second story. If I could remember the phrase(s) at the moment, I would point out how, but my memory wouldn't give it up on demand. Cursed thing.

BJ

It is actually kind of ironic that this thread would be started when it was. I posted a new piece of fiction "Clark's Card" today. I had written it, along with the feedback post, a few week's ago, and had forgotten that it would be pertinent to this thread.

As I mentioned in my request-for-feedback post, after I wrote my story, I read a story by another author that used some similar terminology. At the time, I had been concerned about possible accusations of plagiarism, and so I ran the relevant parts of both stories by LabRat. She didn't think the similarities were sufficient enough to post a problem, so I didn't revise my story. But I did make a point of referring to the other story in my request-for-feedback post just to be extra safe. (Thanks again, Labrat! )

Joy,
Lynn

@Lynn: "Clark's Card" made me cry.

Aki: I know you're reading this. You better top Clark's card, buster!

@Everyone: I'm just glad I'm not alone. LoL. I was feeling so guilty!

She slapped him. Hard.

That phrase, more or less exactly as printed, has appeared in two of my stories. I don't think I was fully aware of it at the time, but when I realized what I'd done, I just let it remain. I do find myself repeating phrases sometimes, though, and it gets annoying.

Glad I'm not the only one, at least! ^_^

I think everyone does this occasionally, especially if you write a lot of short fic and/or have a bad memory. For example, I re-used the same Terminator / Angel / Highlander name gag in two stories here ; my excuse is I wrote them three years apart and didn't notice until I was looking out stuff to post to a Highlander site. In other stories I have multiple instances of sunlamps used against vampires, etc. etc.

I don't think I use the same turn of phrase in multiple stories quite so much, but there are undoubtedly things I do recycle. So long as it's my own work I'm borrowing I don't worry too much.

In a good way, I hope!

LOL! Aki, I hope Clark's card gave you some useful ideas and that you can easily leap way over the bar it set.

Joy,
Lynn

I think it is rather easy to plagiarize yourself, whether it be with ideas or wording. Different things appeal to different people, and we all have certain weaknesses or habits based on what appeals to us. (One habit of mine I have learned about rather recently is that I use "just" a lot in my writing.) But I guess part of growing as a writer is trying to be more conscious of things that you use a lot...and then trying to strive to be more original while also writing in a style that is distinctively "you."

All that said, I'm actually using a few ideas from my last story for one I'm working on now, heh...but I'm using them in different ways. Still, "oops" for trying to support originality, eh? Ah well.

One of my bad habits (and I know I have a lot of them )is that I always have people breathing:

Clark snorted.

Lois let out a long, slow breath.

Perry sighed.

As a result, I get not-so-cryptic messages from Gerry telling me: Quit having everyone breathe!

Uhh... Gerry, if everyone stops breathing, they'll die . Of course, I know what she means. She means quit telling the reader that everyone is breathing - or at least, don't do it quite so often. After all, if they are still talking, they are obviously still breathing.

But it's as if when I write, 'Lois let out a long, slow breath,' what I'm really doing is giving the characters a break while I figure out what they are going to say next.

I have to go back through my stories before posting them and take out a lot of my references to breathing. Hopefully, I've mostly succeeded.

Probably shouldn't have told everyone that - now you're all going to be conscious of people breathing when you read my stories (if you weren't already) .

ML

@Marcus: yeah. i suppose when you're lifting stuff from your own work, it's just borrowing and no big deal.

@Lynn: yep! absolutely.

@MLT: ooh! thanks for giving me an idea on another thing i can have people do other than yell at each other. lol.

LOL! Hahahah. That bit actually made me snort, heh. It really is handy to put in a sigh here and an inhale there! At least Gerry points it out for you, eh? I guess one challenging part of writing is you have to decide what to include and what not to include-- do you include every sigh? Every shift of the hands? Every item in the room? Of course not. But choose the ones to include...well, there's the tricky part. You don't want to bog down the work, but you do want to fill your world! And sometimes, those people have to breathe!

@Deja Vu: I guess it's just really hard to balance the art and science in writing. Especially for LnC, wherein the best fics have A-plots and B-plots, sometimes you really need to have standby lines and things you can use when you run out of stuff to describe things with. XD