Borrowing

Borrowing

One of the shortcuts a writer can use for any of the Big Three story elements (plot, characters, setting/backstory) is to borrow them from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” covers a lot of ground; the caveat is that if one is going to borrow from anything that is trademarked or under copyright, one has to make the borrowing as invisible as possible. Borrowing from historical incidents, out-of-copyright work, legends, myths, and fairy tales doesn’t come with the threat of lawsuits.

Borrowing, as I am using the term, ranges from all-but-invisible inspiration to clear retellings and pastiche. History is one of the most useful places from which to borrow characters, plots, and incidents, which is why writers collect books like Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany ­­­­by Erik Midelfort. Real people get up to all sorts of useful shenanigans; the history of the Imperial family of Rome, starting with Augustus, can source all kinds of deadly court politics and/or family drama (which events A.E. Van Vogt lifted wholesale for Empire of the Atom back in 1956; other writers have done a less obvious job of working from the same history).

Authors have been borrowing from history and from other authors since writing was invented. This is one reason why literature classes spend so much time focusing on writers’ sources. Shakespeare borrowed from history, poetry, and other writers, sometimes much more blatantly than one could get away with now. (Shakespeare could do that. You aren’t Shakespeare.)

If you are inspired to borrow from a source that is currently under copyright (or if this is your preferred method for overcoming your plot/character/background problems) there are a few things you should keep in mind, whether you’re borrowing from a novel, a movie, a song, or a poem.

First, change all the names completely. Duke Warmwater and his sidekick robots H202 and ICU are not going to cut it. If at all possible, change other aspects of whatever you’re borrowing to make it/him/her/them fit your story better or make it more interesting. Change the borrowed character’s age, gender, skills/occupation; give the loner a family or make the family guy a loner. Strip the borrowed planet down to essentials—this world is the only source of Unobtanium, which is vital to space traffic—and then rebuild it as a water world instead of a desert, with varying terrain and climate in different archipelagos instead of a one-climate planet, and invent sea monsters that are the source of the Unobtanium instead of the desert worms. Do the same for plot borrowing; strip it down to the three-sentence elevator pitch and rebuild it to fit your characters and setting.

Second, combine multiple sources. There’s an old saying that goes something like “Taking from one source is plagiarism; taking from six sources is research.” Cast your characters each from a different source:  Tony Stark/Iron Man as Hamlet, Princess Leia as his mother Queen Gertrude, Hermione Granger as his buddy Horatio, Mulan as Ophelia and Bruce Lee as her brother Laertes, Hannibal Lector as Claudius. Then figure out what that does to the way the plot unfolds…

Don’t borrow from bestsellers, classics, or really popular sources unless you want to be obvious, as with West Side Story, or unless your character or setting choices are going to warp the original plot so far from its source that it will be unrecognizable. (I think that casting the characters above in Hamlet would very likely mean that the plot would become unrecognizable pretty much from the point where the ghost of the previous king tells Hamlet/Stark “Your uncle Claudius/Hannibal murdered [and ate] me,” if not before (because I can’t see Gertrude/Leia having married Claudius/Hannibal, no matter how much he pressured/manipulated her. And if Gertrude/Leia is the one on the throne, and Stark/IronMan is supporting her, Fortinbras and Claudius/Hannibal are toast…).

Obscure and/or really poorly executed stories are good choices for borrowing plots, especially if it is easy to see what the original author’s mistake(s) were. Taking a poorly executed plot and fixing it is generally much simpler than changing a brilliant plot enough so that it isn’t recognizable, but not changing it so much that it stops working. Also, people are less likely to accuse writers of plagiarism if they have expanded, extended, or vastly improved on the source material (see Shakespeare, above).

On the flip side, playing around with well-known (and therefore easily recognizable) fairy tales as sources of plot works equally well because a) well-known fairy tales are usually out of copyright or have a much older version that is out of copyright, b) fairy tales are practically pure plot summaries that can be applied to many different times, places, and people (many of the oldest versions don’t even name most of the characters beyond their roles in the story: the Elder Brothers, the Fairy Godmother, the Wicked Uncle/Stepmother, the Brave Tailor, the Prince/Princess/King/Queen), and c) not only are fairy tales plot summaries, they’re plot summaries that have been refined over centuries of retelling and have lasted.

Tracking down different versions of the same fairy tale (from different countries and/or different centuries) is fun and fascinating (to me, anyway) all on its own, and can be an interesting exercise in seeing how different times, places, and cultures can shift the details of a story without making it even slightly unrecognizable.

Alternatively, browsing through tale-type and motif indexes is like a historical/myth-legend-fairy-tale version of “TV Tropes” especially if you can find a library that has one of the print versions that includes lists of which fairy tales include what motifs and plot variations. I find them far more useful than the “36 Dramatic situations” that are more frequently quoted to writers.