plagiarizing... yourself? ; Eastwick
Sep. 24th, 2009 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verushka70Ok, 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.
Now, while Fraser seems very open-minded when it comes to other people, and would clearly spare no efforts, no matter how bizarre, to catch a criminal or solve a crime (Hawk and a Handsaw, Some Like It Red), there are other times when Fraser seems quite inconsistently prudish. I've always attributed this to his tolerance for other people's quirks and individuality, but his exceedingly high moral standards for himself.
So originally, in my way old dom!F/sub!K bdsm DS story series, I had Fraser dominant but all guilty about it. And trying to work it out within himself, and not doing a very good job. Now, in the DC/DS Mike/Ray kinkfic with voyeur!F, I have Fraser wrestling with both the fact that Ray -- on whom (in this story) he has a barely acknowledged, mostly sublimated, romantically paralyzed crush, which also makes him envious of Mike and jealously obsessed with the Mike/Ray hookup, yet turned on by it, once he discovers it -- is into bondage, Ray hooks up with Mike for some clearly casual bondage sex (Mike is only in town for a case, and will be going back to Toronto), his own voyeurism, and his new knowledge of Ray's sexual proclivities, about which he can say nothing without revealing that he was voyeur to Mike and Ray's encounters.
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.
When I was in nursing school, for our big research papers, they made us use TurnItIn.com to submit our papers, because that has a huge database of journal articles, periodicals, and previously turned in (and purchasable) papers to search through and determine how much of your paper has been word for word plagiarized. (Obviously if you have things properly quoted, indented, and cited, it's not plagiarism, it's use of a source, which the site doesn't distinguish, but, then, that's your instructor's job).
So I am slightly comforted by the fact that, were I to turn in both stories, as is, right now, to TurnItIn.com, they would not be flagged as plagiarizing each other, because the actual prose was sufficiently different, even if the concepts and action were pretty much the same.
But only slightly comforted. I dunno why this makes me feel uncomfortable. I guess it's the "OMG what if I have lost my originality?" fear lurking in the back of me. Nothing about me has ever stood out very much, in my mind, except my intelligence and weirdness (though I have continually failed to live up to "my potential" at least by conventional standards -- wow, what a surprise). Which some have charitably called "originality." (As in, "You're... you're a real 'original' girl." But, you know, those who ever got that far... they always called again.*g*)
When I was really young, I hid my intelligence and weirdness (keep in mind, when the time came in 4th grade to join band/orchestra and pick an instrument, these were the days -- or at least, the days and the place -- when, in response to me saying "I want to play the drums!" they said, "You can't. You're a girl. Pick somethinmg else." Oh. And then there was Little League, which I yearned to play (I walked around wearing my brother's Cub Scouts baseball cap from, like, age 2 'til like age 9), and couldn't. They didn't have Title IX then. I mean, add a totally dysfunctional, frequently violent family, and it became instinctual to hide the real me.
When I got a little older, I got more comfortable with showing it, but I only showed it to my friends. When I got older than that, I gave up and realized it hadn't been working all that well -- I mean, I kept meeting people who somehow knew how weird I was (I guess because that's what they were looking for?) -- so I just let my freak flag fly and let the chips fall where they fell. And that was kind of a relief.
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.
Now, while Fraser seems very open-minded when it comes to other people, and would clearly spare no efforts, no matter how bizarre, to catch a criminal or solve a crime (Hawk and a Handsaw, Some Like It Red), there are other times when Fraser seems quite inconsistently prudish. I've always attributed this to his tolerance for other people's quirks and individuality, but his exceedingly high moral standards for himself.
So originally, in my way old dom!F/sub!K bdsm DS story series, I had Fraser dominant but all guilty about it. And trying to work it out within himself, and not doing a very good job. Now, in the DC/DS Mike/Ray kinkfic with voyeur!F, I have Fraser wrestling with both the fact that Ray -- on whom (in this story) he has a barely acknowledged, mostly sublimated, romantically paralyzed crush, which also makes him envious of Mike and jealously obsessed with the Mike/Ray hookup, yet turned on by it, once he discovers it -- is into bondage, Ray hooks up with Mike for some clearly casual bondage sex (Mike is only in town for a case, and will be going back to Toronto), his own voyeurism, and his new knowledge of Ray's sexual proclivities, about which he can say nothing without revealing that he was voyeur to Mike and Ray's encounters.
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.
When I was in nursing school, for our big research papers, they made us use TurnItIn.com to submit our papers, because that has a huge database of journal articles, periodicals, and previously turned in (and purchasable) papers to search through and determine how much of your paper has been word for word plagiarized. (Obviously if you have things properly quoted, indented, and cited, it's not plagiarism, it's use of a source, which the site doesn't distinguish, but, then, that's your instructor's job).
So I am slightly comforted by the fact that, were I to turn in both stories, as is, right now, to TurnItIn.com, they would not be flagged as plagiarizing each other, because the actual prose was sufficiently different, even if the concepts and action were pretty much the same.
But only slightly comforted. I dunno why this makes me feel uncomfortable. I guess it's the "OMG what if I have lost my originality?" fear lurking in the back of me. Nothing about me has ever stood out very much, in my mind, except my intelligence and weirdness (though I have continually failed to live up to "my potential" at least by conventional standards -- wow, what a surprise). Which some have charitably called "originality." (As in, "You're... you're a real 'original' girl." But, you know, those who ever got that far... they always called again.*g*)
When I was really young, I hid my intelligence and weirdness (keep in mind, when the time came in 4th grade to join band/orchestra and pick an instrument, these were the days -- or at least, the days and the place -- when, in response to me saying "I want to play the drums!" they said, "You can't. You're a girl. Pick somethinmg else." Oh. And then there was Little League, which I yearned to play (I walked around wearing my brother's Cub Scouts baseball cap from, like, age 2 'til like age 9), and couldn't. They didn't have Title IX then. I mean, add a totally dysfunctional, frequently violent family, and it became instinctual to hide the real me.
When I got a little older, I got more comfortable with showing it, but I only showed it to my friends. When I got older than that, I gave up and realized it hadn't been working all that well -- I mean, I kept meeting people who somehow knew how weird I was (I guess because that's what they were looking for?) -- so I just let my freak flag fly and let the chips fall where they fell. And that was kind of a relief.
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/ )