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plagiarizing... yourself? ; Eastwick
Sep. 24th, 2009 01:12 pmOk, so I'm not working on the two WIPs I should be working o. (I keep telling myself, I'm letting them rest -- like dough, right? after kneading. yeah, yeah -- that's my story an' I'm stickin' to it!)
And I'm working on a DC Mike/Nathalie angsty porn plot bunny which attacked me out of the blue, and a DC/DS Mike/RayK kinkfic request on the Fall Fandom Free For All (FFFFA) , and I haven't even started the other FFFFA request I said I'd do, which was for Forever Knight, a very old fandom which has a special place in my heart as my first real fandom. Clearly, I am more motivated by challenges, requests, and deadlines -- and the occasional, "Hey, when x and y got together, what did they do and what was it like and what was going through their heads?" meanderings of my mind -- than, um, getting down to business and finishing what I've started. But, like, my two WIPs are so OLD. And LONG. And I'm tired. I need time AWAY from them. I guess.
So I'm working on this smutty Mike/Ray kink fic, and it so happens that one of my WIPs is also a kink fic (Fraser/Ray), and I've run across this situation in the Mike/Ray where Fraser (who is a voyeur -- I forgot to mention that part) is having issues with both what he's watching Mike and Ray do, and the fact that he's watching, because, well, he's Fraser.
( side tangent on Fraser canon on his openmindedness and yet prudishness which is related to what happened while I was writing )
Anyway. So I'm humming along, writing, having Fraser wrestle with all this, and coming up with a way for him to resolve it, and suddenly I realized: shit, I am plagiarizing myself: I just wrote almost the exact same thing over three weeks ago in my long WIP dom!F/sub!K DS bdsm fic, in which Fraser similarly wrestles with his issues. Except in a much longer, more angsty form, and with more than just one way of Fraser trying to resolve it.
While suddenly realizing I was plagiarizing myself gave me new ideas -- because then I had to rethink both stories' means by which Fraser wrestles with and resolves (or doesn't) his issues with his own kinkiness -- and while it was creatively useful, conceptually speaking, I really had to stop a moment and go:
Um. Isn't this bad? I mean, isn't it cheating to plagiarize myself? I mean, obviously, in the finished product, it's not going to be plagiarized; I'll fix all that so it's original material. It's fine to flash back to stuff that previously occurred in prequel stories or what have you, or to re-interpret (without lifting verbatim) old plot devices or events in characters' lives. Or hell, to remix something.
But... I dunno, I just felt... guilty. Like I was cheating on homework or something. It was weird. I know "real" authors have done this themselves many times. I mean, I think I read somewhere once that Shakespeare did it, and that Samuel Coleridge did, too. But. It made me wonder. Did they do it, knowing they did it? Or did they do it accidentally? Because this was a total accident. Obviously, I had it on my mind, because I'd been working on something similar. But I wasn't intentionally making writing a fic easier on myself by just lifting sections of it from another fic -- I was actually in the middle of composing new material with the same character actions when I realized what I was doing and that it was kind of plagiarizing myself.
( tangent on being able to prove I wasn't verbatim plagiarizing myself, and why this worries me, even though I know, like, major real fic authors have done this with themselves )
So, um, I guess that's important to me. My original freakiness. So, I don't want this 'oops, I plagiarized myself' thing to be a symptom of me losing that. Because that would suck.
ETA: Oh, yeah. Watched Eastwick last night. Um. PG? Hot as ever. But everyone: tone down the makeup. People, it's HD TV. Tons of makeup=old style TV; 'natural look'/less makeup=good HD viewing, even if it shows imperfections. Also, it looks like Rebecca Romijn's put on some weight. And, frankly, I think it suits her quite a bit. And did I mention PG was hot? I look forward to him being bad. Very, very bad. And the writing improving.
Never read the book, though I loved the movie w/Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Jack Nicholson. So I may have to pick up Updike's book, now, and actually see what started it all.
So glad PG is doing his own take on it. (Nothing wrong with Jack, but... he's like Al Pacino -- one of those actors who kind of plays himself in everything he does. But, hey, Nicholson can be forgiven just for having done Cuckoo's Nest so long before. And I mean, Pacino can definitely be forgiven. I mean, there's the way slashy Michael Mann Heat w/DeNiro. But waaaaay before that, there was Cruising? Hawwwt. B-movie exploitative gay-leather-sex late-70s hawwwwt. \o/ )
And I'm working on a DC Mike/Nathalie angsty porn plot bunny which attacked me out of the blue, and a DC/DS Mike/RayK kinkfic request on the Fall Fandom Free For All (FFFFA) , and I haven't even started the other FFFFA request I said I'd do, which was for Forever Knight, a very old fandom which has a special place in my heart as my first real fandom. Clearly, I am more motivated by challenges, requests, and deadlines -- and the occasional, "Hey, when x and y got together, what did they do and what was it like and what was going through their heads?" meanderings of my mind -- than, um, getting down to business and finishing what I've started. But, like, my two WIPs are so OLD. And LONG. And I'm tired. I need time AWAY from them. I guess.
So I'm working on this smutty Mike/Ray kink fic, and it so happens that one of my WIPs is also a kink fic (Fraser/Ray), and I've run across this situation in the Mike/Ray where Fraser (who is a voyeur -- I forgot to mention that part) is having issues with both what he's watching Mike and Ray do, and the fact that he's watching, because, well, he's Fraser.
( side tangent on Fraser canon on his openmindedness and yet prudishness which is related to what happened while I was writing )
Anyway. So I'm humming along, writing, having Fraser wrestle with all this, and coming up with a way for him to resolve it, and suddenly I realized: shit, I am plagiarizing myself: I just wrote almost the exact same thing over three weeks ago in my long WIP dom!F/sub!K DS bdsm fic, in which Fraser similarly wrestles with his issues. Except in a much longer, more angsty form, and with more than just one way of Fraser trying to resolve it.
While suddenly realizing I was plagiarizing myself gave me new ideas -- because then I had to rethink both stories' means by which Fraser wrestles with and resolves (or doesn't) his issues with his own kinkiness -- and while it was creatively useful, conceptually speaking, I really had to stop a moment and go:
Um. Isn't this bad? I mean, isn't it cheating to plagiarize myself? I mean, obviously, in the finished product, it's not going to be plagiarized; I'll fix all that so it's original material. It's fine to flash back to stuff that previously occurred in prequel stories or what have you, or to re-interpret (without lifting verbatim) old plot devices or events in characters' lives. Or hell, to remix something.
But... I dunno, I just felt... guilty. Like I was cheating on homework or something. It was weird. I know "real" authors have done this themselves many times. I mean, I think I read somewhere once that Shakespeare did it, and that Samuel Coleridge did, too. But. It made me wonder. Did they do it, knowing they did it? Or did they do it accidentally? Because this was a total accident. Obviously, I had it on my mind, because I'd been working on something similar. But I wasn't intentionally making writing a fic easier on myself by just lifting sections of it from another fic -- I was actually in the middle of composing new material with the same character actions when I realized what I was doing and that it was kind of plagiarizing myself.
( tangent on being able to prove I wasn't verbatim plagiarizing myself, and why this worries me, even though I know, like, major real fic authors have done this with themselves )
So, um, I guess that's important to me. My original freakiness. So, I don't want this 'oops, I plagiarized myself' thing to be a symptom of me losing that. Because that would suck.
ETA: Oh, yeah. Watched Eastwick last night. Um. PG? Hot as ever. But everyone: tone down the makeup. People, it's HD TV. Tons of makeup=old style TV; 'natural look'/less makeup=good HD viewing, even if it shows imperfections. Also, it looks like Rebecca Romijn's put on some weight. And, frankly, I think it suits her quite a bit. And did I mention PG was hot? I look forward to him being bad. Very, very bad. And the writing improving.
Never read the book, though I loved the movie w/Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Jack Nicholson. So I may have to pick up Updike's book, now, and actually see what started it all.
So glad PG is doing his own take on it. (Nothing wrong with Jack, but... he's like Al Pacino -- one of those actors who kind of plays himself in everything he does. But, hey, Nicholson can be forgiven just for having done Cuckoo's Nest so long before. And I mean, Pacino can definitely be forgiven. I mean, there's the way slashy Michael Mann Heat w/DeNiro. But waaaaay before that, there was Cruising? Hawwwt. B-movie exploitative gay-leather-sex late-70s hawwwwt. \o/ )