How can I know that I'm not plagiarizing?

Question

New to the web. I just recently started to write again. I won a few highschool prizes writing short stories. Around the same time, I began to play Roleplaying games and to write different stories for different games.

Lately, I have been thinking about a few ideas. Instead of creating a story for a Roleplaying game, I decided to write them down. I have seen that you can self publish your work on Amazon. And that most "novice" novels go from 50k words to 100k.

But as I write, what worries me the most is the fact that even if I'm changing and mixing a lot of ideas. I cannot stop feeling that I have read that before somewhere else.

Is this a problem? Can I have legal issues? Is there any rule or way to check this feeling?

I don't have anyone who I trust to check for me.

Cheers.

Answer 1

El ver mucho y el leer mucho avivan los ingenios de los hombres. (Seeing much and reading much sharpens one's ingenuity.)

~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Your fear of plagiarism is a common anxiety for beginning writers. After you gain experience and confidence in yourself, you will have no problems producing original content, and you'll stop worrying about accidental plagiarism.

These simple guidelines might help you:

• If you're writing for yourself, you can do anything you want.
• If you're writing for other people like friends or an informal workshop, be honest about re-using other people's materials, and explain how you're using it.
• If you're writing for school or publication:
  • Write only original content.
  • Avoid plagiarizing by not copying other people's words.
  • Avoid copyright infringement by not copying other people's story ideas and characters.

If your fear of plagiarism is holding you back, you can find and use free plagiarism checkers online.

Answer 2

You are allowed to reuse ideas, but you are not allowed to reuse exact characters, names, or blocks of text.

Let's take The Lord of the Rings as an example. You're not allowed to use the character Gandalf, but you can certainly use a wizardly mentor figure. You can't use Frodo or Sauron, but if you want to have a peace-loving hobbit go on a quest to destroy the evil dark lord by throwing a magic ring into a volcano, you can do that. You might be thought derivative, but you're not guilty of plagiarism.

(You'd probably want to avoid the word "hobbit" in your work. This term was created by Tolkien, and may or may not have become sufficiently general over time, but it would probably take a court case to decide for certain. When Dungeons & Dragons adapted much of Tolkien's world, they changed the name of their hobbit race to 'halfling' for legal reasons. But words like 'elf' and 'dwarf' were perfectly fine to keep, because they weren't Tolkien originals.)

I like using The Lord of the Rings as an example for these types of questions, because there's a very successful series whose first book, The Sword of Shannara, basically ripped off the plot and characters of The Lord of the Rings wholesale, and doing so was perfectly legal. Terribly derivative, in my opinion, and not really a very good book; but it achieved a significant measure of commercial success nonetheless.

In practice, you don't need to worry about legal issues just because you "cannot stop feeling that [you] have read that before somewhere else" provided that you don't literally use the same names or characters. Seriously, if you're worried, go track down a copy of The Sword of Shannara (your local library probably has a copy) to get an idea of just how far you can push the envelope without any legal ramifications whatsoever.