Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Have you ever plagiarised yourself?

@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