I've only seen the previews, but J-Lo's movie The Back Up Plan sounds oddly like the premise of Lori Bryant Woolridge's book Weapons of Mass Seduction. I know, I know, I'm the first person who tells aspiring writers not to worry about someone stealing your stuff. When I do writer workshops, I ask for a show of hands of the people who are afraid to let anyone read their work because they fear creative theft. I counter with..."If you can find five people who want to read your work, I'll be impressed." Let's face it, reading is fundamental, but it's also something that had to be instilled in you at an early age. Pre-Facebook, pre-texting without syllables, pre-Salacious gossip sites, and pre-video games. So finding someone who will actually sit down with an unknown writer's work and spend the weekend with it takes a great deal of commitment.
This is a touchy subject. I'm one of those folks who believe in the travel of energy. While you're thinking of a brilliant idea, someone else is thinking of the exact same thing, or many someone else's. What matters is the one who actually puts the thought into action. Like the day I spent pitching to my agent movie ideas. It was like a bad batting average. Everything I had worked weeks on presenting was being filmed as we spoke. Daddy Daycare (Eddie Murphy), Rebound (Martin Lawrence), Are We there Yet (Ice Cube). It was horrifying. Each idea was met with, "that's being done by so-and-so, yep, yep, yep." That's when I realized the amazing power of our thoughts. They travel and sometimes land in other people's hands.
I've watched movie after movie (get made while waiting for the release of Nappily Ever After, seeing similarities in scenes and wondering did they read the book and say, 'hey,why not, Halle's taking too long', or is it pure coincidence? It's a delicate line that gets crossed. Even while writing, I have to be careful of where a certain scene or idea may have come from. Was it my original idea, or did I read or see something that sparked the vision?
I'll never forget a conference I attended and sat on the panel. Afterward, the writer acting as mediator, told me she liked my book, but it reminded her of a movie she'd already seen. I'll never forget that feeling. What? Had I seen the movie too and not realized I'd used the same premise? My book Roadrunner had only been published a few months, though it had taken me a couple of years to write. The movie I later found out was The Fan(1996) starring Robert De Niro and Wesley Snipes. Every time the movie ran on cable, I'd cringe. My husband would say, "I can see the similarities, but trust me, they're nothing alike." It took me a few years to stop wondering. They both are about an all-star baseball player and that's about where the consistency ends. Roadrunner is about a professional baseball player who is cut from his team after his addiction to painkillers and steroids cause him to turn violent on a fellow player. This leads to the slow unraveling of his family, his disappearance and eventually his wife falling into the arms of the police officer that showed up to her domestic call. (I can think of another couple of movies with that storyline.) So how do you know if there's a case of plagiarism or simply crossed neuro-paths? My definition: If you know you're staring at someone else's work while you're working, you're stealing. If you're in a quiet place and you're ideas are fresh and flowing with ease, you are creating. Stealing someone else's idea is difficult to prove. Copying lines word for word is blatant theft. What's left in the middle are the commonalities that we share in our human condition called life. Shared experiences. Shared journeys. This is what makes a story fun and enjoyable, knowing it's our story too. We identify with the emotions and the possibilities. For all the future writers out there, it's still your story. Though something looks exactly like what you were thinking, it's still your story and no one can tell it from your perspective. Write. Write, and keep writing.
