NO! SOMEONE GOT THERE FIRST!

You might call this a horror story: The Terrifying Spectre of Someone Getting There First.

One of the heart-stopping moments in any writer's life - for unpublished as well as published bods - is when one hears that another author is about to produce a book which sounds horribly, terrifyingly, teeth-gnashingly similar to the one we are writing or planning or dreaming of. Our instinct is to believe that this is The End, and that we must now ditch the fabulous idea.

No. Calm down. This is real life. It happens and it doesn't matter, because your story will be different (unless you are actually going to read it and steal from  it). To understand fully, read the inimitable Editorial Ass explaining why it's no cause for concern.

I have my own story of extraordinary coincidence which I have written about before. Rather than send you away to that blog post, I'll copy the relevant bit below. (Note: I was writing from the perspective of the issue of plagiarism, but my point about not worrying if you discover in advance that someone is writing something that sounds similar, is equally relevant.)

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THE EXTRAORDINARY COINCIDENCE
In October 2002, my first novel, Mondays are Red, was published. I'd been writing it during 2000/2001. Being unpublished, and not knowing any published author at all, let alone a stellar one like Tim Bowler, I had no way of knowing what any other author was writing in the privacy of his/her own garret.

Mondays are Red is a Young Adult novel about a 14 year-old boy called Luke who has synaesthesia.

A month later, in November 2002, Tim Bowler's umpteenth novel, Starseeker, was published. He had also been writing it during 2000/2001. (For those of you who don't know the business, any book published in November would already have been printed by October. Unless it's the biog of Michael Jackson.)

Starseeker is a Young Adult novel about a 14-year-old boy called Luke who has synaesthesia.

Because they were published in consecutive months, we had some joint reviews (hooray for me, debut author being reviewed and interviewed alongside TB!) but no one accused the other of plagiarism, because it obviously wasn't, because a) it couldn't have been, time-wise, and b) despite the identical descriptions above, they are two utterly different stories. Couldn't be more different. (Unless mine had been about a fifteen-year-old girl called Lucy with synaesthesia.)

But it's worth considering the following:

• if Tim's novel had come out while I was still writing mine, I'd have changed the name and probably the age of the protagonist because the last thing I'd want is to appear to plagiarise - and I'd have panicked, horribly; I might even have cried;
• next time you hear that two stories have the same motif / theme / premise, don't leap to the conclusion either that one is plagiarising or that they will actually be the same - unless they are;
• similarly with the horrible word "derivative" - nothing stands entirely on its own. No author is an island. Yes, some are unduly influenced, sometimes conconsciously, and occasionally some actually steal, which is disgraceful. But some influence is legitimate, inevitable and right. Writing and ideas are contagious, but they will mutate in the environment of a different mind.

There's a funny ending to this story
Tim and I became good friends and discovered we thought in many ways alike. "That's not very funny," I hear you say. No, but when I became friends with him I was writing another book, which had the provisional title of Apocalypse.

Luckily, authory friends tend to tell each other what they're writing.

"What you writing at the moment, Tim?" I asked.

"It's called Apocalypse," he replied. "It's about ..."

And since his Apocalypse was coming out before mine, guess who decided to change her title, even though there's no copyright on titles? It became The Passionflower Massacre. Much better. Who'd want to call a book Apocalypse anyway? Silly man.

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So, the fact that the concept sounds the same says nothing about whether the story is going to be in any way the same. It's most unlikely to be the same in any important way if you simply happen to have had the same-sounding idea without reading it.

My next novel, Wasted, has a concept which makes it sound like the film Sliding Doors and the book Dice Man. I haven't read Dice Man yet - though I will, after Wasted is published. I did see Sliding Doors years ago, mainly because I first started writing this book about 15 years ago and people kept saying, "You should see Sliding Doors". In much trepidation, I did. I needn't have worried. Yes, the underlying concept sounds similar, until you read the book and see the film and then you realise that nothing apart from the underlying concept is similar at all. Sliding Doors follows two possibilities, each equally "true", Wasted looks at one "true world", with many what ifs disappearing into nothingness.

Am I worried that Dice Man may turn out to have some unpleasant similarities? Well, if you want me to be honest, I am a little. But if I follow my own advice, I shouldn't be, should I?? All I know is that I was writing the idea before Dice Man was published and have been fascinated by causal determinism and theories of chance since I studied philosophy at University. So, if there are any similarities, they will be interesting but nothing to worry about.

So, if you decide not to worry about similar ideas, I won't either. OK?

(NB: I'm away today and tomorrow, doing school talks and meeting a publisher. )