Stance on stories inspired by others?

[Voboy]

Tilt. "They don't get the word," that's your problem, not theirs. It's not up to the original copyright holder to be available for use permission requests. If you can't get an active permission from them, that's your problem, not theirs. Due diligence doesn't have a damn thing to do about it.

Lol.

He's asking for opinions. I gave mine. It's worth whatever he's paying for it. Clearly you disagree; congratulations.

 

[KeithD]

Lol.

He's asking for opinions. I gave mine. It's worth whatever he's paying for it. Clearly you disagree; congratulations.

The law disagrees with you. You gave crappy advice.

 

[Voboy]

The law disagrees with you. You gave crappy advice.

Then you're more than welcome not to follow it.

 

[PennameWombat]

Yep. That's why I said "make an effort to contact them."

If they don't get the word, they don't get the word. But if you feel an ethical need to acknowledge their work (and it sounds like you do), then you'll have done your due diligence and paid your debt.

In the Real World, this is where orphan works (or 'unlocatable copyright owners') comes in - owned by someone that can't be found. A few countries not the US recognise this, and if you can show an effort to have identified and contact a copyright holder but cannot, that can reduce or ameliorate infringement claims later. Canada has a formal regime, you go to a specific copyright panel and show your evidence of attempting to contact an unlocatable copyright holder and they may grant you a license to use such a work. They can require you to be prepared to pay royalties to the holder should they show up. Australia has mooted a similar law change more than once, but never 'pulled the trigger' so to speak. The US has discussed it, but again, the law has no support for such provisions.

Clearly, precisely none of that applies here.

Like with Simon's 'mailgirl' example, I have mermaid (well, merpeople) stories. So do plenty of others. Anyone can write mermaid stories. But, I, personally, wouldn't write a direct sequel or sidequel to someone else's story, unless they asked me to. But I definitely wouldn't if I couldn't get permission. And I wouldn't want someone writing direct sequels using my work without asking.

Would I write a story set in a similar world to other stories here? Of course. I currently do. I'm writing stories set on Earth, some have aliens, some involve group sex, others don't. But now we're discussing how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

 

[HHHawkeye]

To clarify, since this will probably help, the core premise that remains the same in the original and in my story is that the protagonist encounters an arrogant and insufferable rich person of the opposite sex, and uses mind control to slowly humble and humiliate them by taking things away from them, both material and psychological, culminating in the protagonist ultimately enslaving the rich person completely and usurping control of their estate. Both stories can be broadly summarized with this description.

A few of the main differences in mine, besides of course the characters and setting being completely different and changing the story from femdom/malesub to maledom/femsub:

1: The dom has a much more personal vendetta against the sub, who has irresponsibly done a lot of damage to the dom's town with her leverage over local city politics. The sub in the original story was just an arrogant ass the dom had met that day.

2: The sub in the original story asked to be hypnotized as part of an easy way out of his punishment for a DUI. The sub in my story only gets hypnotized because the dom, with nothing left to lose, manages to get himself alone with the sub and take a lucky guess at what trigger word she was born with (as everyone in their world is).

3: The process of humbling the sub in the original story is a six step process, whereas in mine the process is seven steps, and the processes only share two (two and a half less charitably) steps between them.

4: The original story had absolutely no sex and only an unzipped fly's worth of nudity, whereas mine has plenty of both. The original was entirely about humiliating and emasculating the sub in mostly non-sexual ways, whereas mine is much more about sexualizing the sub and her gradual descent into submission and humility.

5: The original constantly swapped between the dom and sub's POV. Mine focuses squarely on the dom's POV.

Do these sound like they're different enough?

 

[Voboy]

To clarify, since this will probably help, the core premise that remains the same in the original and in my story is that the protagonist encounters an arrogant and insufferable rich person of the opposite sex, and uses mind control to slowly humble and humiliate them by taking things away from them, both material and psychological, culminating in the protagonist ultimately enslaving the rich person completely and usurping control of their estate. Both stories can be broadly summarized with this description.

A few of the main differences in mine, besides of course the characters and setting being completely different and changing the story from femdom/malesub to maledom/femsub:

1: The dom has a much more personal vendetta against the sub, who has irresponsibly done a lot of damage to the dom's town with her leverage over local city politics. The sub in the original story was just an arrogant ass the dom had met that day.

2: The sub in the original story asked to be hypnotized as part of an easy way out of his punishment for a DUI. The sub in my story only gets hypnotized because the dom, with nothing left to lose, manages to get himself alone with the sub and take a lucky guess at what trigger word she was born with (as everyone in their world is).

3: The process of humbling the sub in the original story is a six step process, whereas in mine the process is seven steps, and the processes only share two (two and a half less charitably) steps between them.

4: The original story had absolutely no sex and only an unzipped fly's worth of nudity, whereas mine has plenty of both. The original was entirely about humiliating and emasculating the sub in mostly non-sexual ways, whereas mine is much more about sexualizing the sub and her gradual descent into submission and humility.

5: The original constantly swapped between the dom and sub's POV. Mine focuses squarely on the dom's POV.

Do these sound like they're different enough?

I won't get into the weeds: I've not read the piece you're basing this on, and I don't know what you're planning. I'm nowhere near qualified to comment on the minutiae.

But you have read that piece, and you do know what you're planning. And you're "worried" that your similarities are getting to be a bit apparent. So? Listen to that voice in your head. You know whether you're going too far, surely.

 

[SimonDoom]

To clarify, since this will probably help, the core premise that remains the same in the original and in my story is that the protagonist encounters an arrogant and insufferable rich person of the opposite sex, and uses mind control to slowly humble and humiliate them by taking things away from them, both material and psychological, culminating in the protagonist ultimately enslaving the rich person completely and usurping control of their estate. Both stories can be broadly summarized with this description.

A few of the main differences in mine, besides of course the characters and setting being completely different and changing the story from femdom/malesub to maledom/femsub:

1: The dom has a much more personal vendetta against the sub, who has irresponsibly done a lot of damage to the dom's town with her leverage over local city politics. The sub in the original story was just an arrogant ass the dom had met that day.

2: The sub in the original story asked to be hypnotized as part of an easy way out of his punishment for a DUI. The sub in my story only gets hypnotized because the dom, with nothing left to lose, manages to get himself alone with the sub and take a lucky guess at what trigger word she was born with (as everyone in their world is).

3: The process of humbling the sub in the original story is a six step process, whereas in mine the process is seven steps, and the processes only share two (two and a half less charitably) steps between them.

4: The original story had absolutely no sex and only an unzipped fly's worth of nudity, whereas mine has plenty of both. The original was entirely about humiliating and emasculating the sub in mostly non-sexual ways, whereas mine is much more about sexualizing the sub and her gradual descent into submission and humility.

5: The original constantly swapped between the dom and sub's POV. Mine focuses squarely on the dom's POV.

Do these sound like they're different enough?

Yes, absolutely. You have nothing to be concerned about.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Yeah, but he stole the quote...

We all agree he was a great artist. lol

 

[alohadave]

There's a genre of stories where the author takes a minor character or characters from a story and creates a new story around them. For example, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". That's really on edge of stealing an author's world, but I think most people find that acceptable.

Those characters are from Shakespeare, and he's been dead for a long time and the work is centuries out of copyright. Using public domain works is not stealing from the author. By definition, public domain belongs to society, and anyone can do what they want with it.

 

[HHHawkeye]

Like with Simon's 'mailgirl' example, I have mermaid (well, merpeople) stories. So do plenty of others. Anyone can write mermaid stories. But, I, personally, wouldn't write a direct sequel or sidequel to someone else's story, unless they asked me to. But I definitely wouldn't if I couldn't get permission. And I wouldn't want someone writing direct sequels using my work without asking.

Would I write a story set in a similar world to other stories here? Of course. I currently do. I'm writing stories set on Earth, some have aliens, some involve group sex, others don't. But now we're discussing how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

Incidentally this reminds me of a lot of commentary on video game genres, how a lot of times things start out being called an "X" clone, before enough "clones" exist that it becomes apparent that the original just birthed a new genre.

 

[Bramblethorn]

There's a genre of stories where the author takes a minor character or characters from a story and creates a new story around them. For example, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". That's really on edge of stealing an author's world, but I think most people find that acceptable.

Shakespeare did this himself, often. Many of his best-known works are based on history, myth, or other people's fiction.

 

[jehoram]

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." (attributed to Pablo Picasso)

And there's Woody Guthrie. When it was pointed out that somebody else's song sounded a lot like his, he said, "He stole that from me. But I steal from everybody."

FWIW, I've run into this situation twice recently. "A Desert Adventure" was inspired by another writer on Lit. Or, rather, my fantasies on what that writer might do in a certain scenario. Before I published the story, I tried to contact her to get her blessing, but received no answer. So I changed the name of the character and published it anyway.

The second time was my story "The Midnight Club." It was inspired by a story I'd read long ago, and I credited that author's existence (if not their name, since I didn't remember it). After I put the story on Lit, I got a comment that suggested the origin of the story. When I read that story, I found that it probably was the one that inspired mine. But the point is that aside from one plot device, the stories were so different in tone and characterizations that nobody would have mistaken one for the other. So I have no guilty feelings about publishing it.

If you want to compare the stories, mine is:
https://www.literotica.com/s/the-midnight-club-ch-01-june

and the other one is:
https://www.literotica.com/s/nicola

 

[wws_wws]

So while it's part of an anthology of stories set in a larger unified setting, the story I'm currently writing is heavily inspired by a story I saw and thought to myself "wow, this would be really hot if the genders were reversed".

But now that I'm mapping the story outline out, I'm starting to get worried that the stories are too similar in concept. That writing an AN of "inspired by [X]" wouldn't be enough, and it would be a sort of faux pas to post it.

So I thought I'd ask some opinions about it. How similar would be too similar in your eyes?

There's nothing new under the sun. Everything is inspired and will inspire others if it's good. I definitely started writing because I felt like there was something missing in the historical fiction genre and I wanted to take the standard trope and give it a new twist. I think that's the key. What's something new that you can bring to the table?

 

[Duleigh]

So while it's part of an anthology of stories set in a larger unified setting, the story I'm currently writing is heavily inspired by a story I saw and thought to myself "wow, this would be really hot if the genders were reversed".

But now that I'm mapping the story outline out, I'm starting to get worried that the stories are too similar in concept. That writing an AN of "inspired by [X]" wouldn't be enough, and it would be a sort of faux pas to post it.

So I thought I'd ask some opinions about it. How similar would be too similar in your eyes?

I've done two, I just made sure I gave credit to my inspiration. My first one sucked, my second one did much better.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

If you want to write a similar tale - concept, theme, plot, etc., that's fine and common in writing. Whether you add an acknowledgement is up to you.

I might be inspired by another writer's tale and think "I should write a story like that".

But, the invention of characters is personal to an author, so I would never take their characters or their world.

In other words - I see it as fair game to steal their soul, but not their clothes.

I can't totally agree with this. There are too many examples in popular literature where characters from one author's work appear in the work of another author. The same is true of worlds created by one author being included in the work of another author. A few examples I could cite involve authors who write in the same genre and who probably know each other well, so there is likely some collaborative dynamic between them.

 

[jsmiam]

…But now that I'm mapping the story outline out, I'm starting to get worried that the stories are too similar in concept. …

This seems to be the crux of the question. You’re getting lots of big picture answers, but it sounds like you yourself spotted too many similarities.

If ten different things happen in the original, do the same ten happen in yours?

Did you start with a blank file or page?

On one extreme, are the erotica tropes. Take a couple steps back and many many stories have similar themes. “Man asks pretty store clerk to help him pick a gift, she eventually models for him, and sex ensues.” I haven’t counted, but I’ll bet there are over 1000 with that basic theme, but only the concept was common. They probably aren’t copies of one another. And p.s., that was MY idea! ;-)

Getting step by step similar, that’s where feeling like a copy starts.

Nonetheless, an auhor’s note giving credit is probably enough. and the other advice here seems like good advice too. But it does sound like you already know the answer.

 

[Rob_Royale]

So while it's part of an anthology of stories set in a larger unified setting, the story I'm currently writing is heavily inspired by a story I saw and thought to myself "wow, this would be really hot if the genders were reversed".

But now that I'm mapping the story outline out, I'm starting to get worried that the stories are too similar in concept. That writing an AN of "inspired by [X]" wouldn't be enough, and it would be a sort of faux pas to post it.

So I thought I'd ask some opinions about it. How similar would be too similar in your eyes?

Hawkeye, how's this going?

 

[Bramblethorn]

I can't totally agree with this. There are too many examples in popular literature where characters from one author's work appear in the work of another author. The same is true of worlds created by one author being included in the work of another author. A few examples I could cite involve authors who write in the same genre and who probably know each other well, so there is likely some collaborative dynamic between them.

Yeah, it depends very much on the relationships between those individuals, and also in the way their characters are being used. 20th-century horror/fantasy in particular had a lot of it - I think HPL's enduring influence on that scene has as much to do with the collaboration he encouraged as with his own works, kind of an open-source community that overlaps with authors from Ambrose Bierce through Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch to Stephen King.

There's also a big difference between a story that uses cameos from another author's work, and one that leans heavily on it. IMHO the best use for the latter is as a way of commenting on the original, rather than just hanging on its coat-tails.

 

[HHHawkeye]

Hawkeye, how's this going?

Unfortunately I got 20k words into it before realizing I didn't actually find it hot anymore, just kinda mean. I'm working on a different story in the same universe, got this on the backburner if I can work out what's wrong with it.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Unfortunately I got 20k words into it before realizing I didn't actually find it hot anymore, just kinda mean. I'm working on a different story in the same universe, got this on the backburner if I can work out what's wrong with it.

I can sympathize. But stories have a way of hanging in your brain and before you know it, you've seen it from a different direction and it's even better. I love those little epiphanies. I don't write during my work week and I use that time to sort out little bugs like that. Can you leave me a link to your published work?

 

[Martles]

If you write about a scene with another published author (with a nom de plume) is it ok to name them and publish on a site where they also publish? Ethically I guess it should be with their consent, or to disguise or publish elsewhere?

“asking for a friend…!”

 

[ElectricBlue]

If you write about a scene with another published author (with a nom de plume) is it ok to name them and publish on a site where they also publish? Ethically I guess it should be with their consent, or to disguise or publish elsewhere?

“asking for a friend…!”

I'd get their consent first, either way.

 

[Djmac1031]

Can an author not write a vampire story because it's been done already?

Look at Hollywood. They recycle stories constantly.

As long as it's not blatant plagiarism, go for it.

Take the concept and write it YOUR way, and you'll be fine.