Hers or Mine?
By Juliet Marillier | April 26, 2007 |
So there I was, wrestling with a scene from the WIP. There’s been a lot of that recently, not to speak of cursing, fidgeting and running off to make cups of tea. It’s got worse since my new editor decided the two books under contract should be delivered in the reverse order, meaning I had to down tools for the current project and get a whole new one written by the same delivery date.
Anyway, there I was a moment later, suddenly in the groove and writing away, and before I knew it a great scene had appeared on the page before me, a scene in which a character interferes with a juggling display by lobbing extraneous items into the mix with mischievous intent, all the while juggling brilliantly himself … I was thrilled with the scene, which had pretty much written itself. But halfway through the celebratory cup of tea, something began gnawing away quietly in my brain. I had read something very like this scene before.
You know those absolutely favourite books, the ones whose covers get more and more dog-eared and tatty as time passes? My family owns a well-traveled, much shared paperback copy of The Crow Road by Iain Banks. It’s done the Perth to London trip several times by various routes, picked fruit on a kibbutz, gone trekking in Nepal, worked in a cardboard box factory and been read in the bath. The book is now so battered, wrinkled and mildewed that we can’t possibly pension it off and buy a new one – no replacement could match this copy for sheer strength of character. When a book is as well loved as this, perhaps it makes its way into some special part of the reader’s memory.
There are many great scenes in The Crow Road, but none of them involves juggling. The nature of my juggling scene led me to a different part of my ‘best-loved books’ shelf. I suspected the culprit was The Lymond Chronicles by Scottish novelist Dorothy Dunnett, a six-book series which I’ve read and re-read many times. I leafed through Queen’s Play and found it on page 83: a short scene in which the anti-hero, in the guise of an Irish bard/entertainer, interferes with a juggling display by lobbing extraneous items … Rats! My scene was indeed based on her scene, and it had to go.
Confession: this is actually the third time I’ve caught myself about to steal an idea from Dorothy Dunnett. It must be at least fifteen years since I last read the Lymond series – long before writing novels became my bread and butter. Clearly, these books have stamped themselves indelibly on my psyche. Few other historical novelists evoke such vivid settings or create such brilliant set-pieces as Dunnett’s. More than anything, I’m an admirer of the understated, elliptical style she used for scenes of high drama or intense feeling. She was quite a stylist and I’m not the only writer to owe her an immense debt. As well as providing me and countless other readers with hours of entrancing entertainment, she demonstrated that historical novelists can be both first class storytellers and consummate practitioners of their craft.
I rewrote my juggling scene and it’s still good, but different. I’m glad I caught it. It was a salutary lesson – books we have known and loved are never really gone from our memories, and may sneak back to haunt us any time they choose.
Postscript: For anyone who likes historical fiction and has not yet sampled Dorothy Dunnett’s work, you should start with The Game of Kings, first book in The Lymond Chronicles. Although the books work as stand alone novels, there is also a compelling, continuous storyline through the entire series.
Photo credit: © Galina Barskaya
Agency: Dreamstime.com
Juliet Marillier has written twenty-four novels for adults and young adults and two collections of short fiction. Her works of historical fantasy have been published around the world and have won numerous awards. Juliet’s most recent series was Warrior Bards, of which the third and final book, A Song of Flight, was published in 2021. Her collection of reimagined fairy tales, Mother Thorn and Other Tales of Courage and Kindness, had its trade release in 2022. Mother Thorn is illustrated by Kathleen Jennings and published by Serenity Press.
Juliet is currently working on a two-book fantasy series. The first book in this duology, The Amber Owl, will be published by New Dawn in February 2025.
When not writing, Juliet looks after a small crew of rescue dogs.
Ah yes, I’ve had this happen to me too. I seem to recall an early effort where I’d gotten my characters into a violent quarrel that sounded just like the one Heathcliff and Cathy had on her deathbed. Good thing that one will never see the light of day. ;-0
Ah, Dorothy Dunnett. I must start a glom on her. Another good historical novelist is Mary Renault. She leaves me breathless.
This has happened to me the other way too. I have what I believe to be a unique hook for a scene, and then shortly thereafter I pick up a new book, and there’s my concept.
Drat. Not so unique after all!
an excellent reminder – esp. in the romance genre where many tales are oft repeated, much to the reader’s dismay
This frightens me. What if we never catch it? Can we really say anything is original?
This (plagiarism) is something that comes up fairly frequently in the news.
I guess there’s a difference between plagiarism (as in, writing almost exactly what someone else wrote) and borrowing a general idea from someone else’s work, which is what I found myself doing. Legally, I could have got away with the scene in question, though readers who knew Dunnett would have been unimpressed. But I would have felt bad about it.
It’s a murky area, I reckon – how close is too close? I think most of us have an inbuilt detection system for these things, so the scene or passage will niggle away at us until we remember its origins. I’ve generally found it hard to believe writers who are caught lifting whole passages from someone else’s work and who use the defence it was completely unconscious. ‘I have a photographic memory.’ Yeah, right.
Can we really say anything is original? I guess not – we can only draw on our own experience as the raw material of our writing, and human experience has been going on for a long time … However each writer is unique and has a unique way of telling her story, so in that sense the old becomes new. I reckon.
Nothing new under any sun, eh? But I’m almost ashamed to admit that I haven’t been able to get into Dunnett’s work. Why? I simply don’t like her MC. He’s an anti-hero par excellence, but me, I like the regular good-guy variety:-)
As a reader, coming across scenes recognized from other stories isn’t disappointing unless the “new” one doesn’t live up to the expectation of the “original.” I’d probably flee madly from anything I wrote that had any hint of Dunnett: She was too good at what she did.
I did come across an author that lifted the midnight feast straight from Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting within, I swear, the first chapter of the book when the characters knew nothing of each other. It did not live up to expectation, and I lost patience with the story before it even really began. Result: Book in trash, not even donated to local book sale.