Borrowing & Sharing Ideas In Fiction - When It's Okay, & When It Isn't

Borrowing - when is it acceptable, and when is it not?

The problem with Eragon wasn’t just that it was similar to other works. The problem was that the similarities were so blatant and the story so poorly-written that many readers felt like they were getting a very poor imitation of these works. Had the characters been better, had the worldbuilding been a little more solid, and had certain plot elements been more believable, they might have felt very differently about it.

On the other hand, the sci-fi show Stargate SG-1 had many similarities to the Star Trek franchise - the plot followed a cast of characters who went around exploring new planets and getting into interstellar trouble, and many of the show’s plot premises were very similar to those found in Star Trek. But the show was more than that - it had a cast of likeable characters who were fun enough to watch that the similarities in plots could often be forgiven. And because the characters’ personalities were different from the characters in Star Trek, they would react to these very similar plots in different ways from the Star Trek characters. Stargate SG-1 also featured more humor than Star Trek did, which in some cases made the show appeal to those who found Star Trek too dry and dull. Also, while Stargate SG-1 bore many similarities to Star Trek, it didn’t copy from Star Trek note for note - which is what many people felt Eragon had done with Star Wars.

Simply borrowing or sharing elements isn’t a problem. It’s a problem when your audience feels like they’re getting an inferior version or a replay of something they’ve already experienced. It's also a problem when it’s clear that a writer simply borrowed something from another story because xe thought it was cool and didn’t stop and think out whether it actually made sense or really added anything of value to xir own story, or when xe just assumed it had to be part of that kind of story and didn't question its presence too much even though it ended up being unnecessary or even nonsensical in the grand scheme of things.

So if you're borrowing something from another story, you need to ask yourself: why does that thing exist in your story, and why do things work that way in your story's universe? For example, Sailor Moon made it fairly clear why the sailor senshi had to fight while being teenagers (the bad guys were here now and even though the sailor senshi were teens, they were the only ones who could fight them), but the characters in Tokyo Mew Mew were magical girls for no other real reason than it was a magical girl story. (Why not augment willing adults with animal DNA to enable them to fight the bad guys, rather than unconsenting children?)

How old ideas can be dusted off and freshened up

Just because something’s been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be good - quite the contrary! If an old idea is handled with love and care, something exceptionally good can be made from it.

When Stan Lee created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor in the early 60’s, superheroes had been around for decades. But Stan Lee brought a new element into the superhero genre - he made his characters three-dimensional human beings with flaws and real-world problems. Before that point, superheroes had been fairly flat characters, with the heroic actions of the superhero persona being more important than the human behind it.

The magical girl anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica shared many things in common with Sailor Moon and other magical girl stories, but it wasn't a story about magical girls simply for the sake of having a story about magical girls. Its universe was very well thought-out and it told a story about magical girls that hadn't been told before. Indeed, the question of why it had to be teenage girls was answered in a brilliant, if dark way.

Compare The Tenth Kingdom with Once Upon A Time. Both are based on the premise that fairytale characters live in another realm apart from our own. Both feature heroines with abandonment issues. Both feature an evil queen as a villain. But you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who call Once Upon A Time a ripoff of The Tenth Kingdom, because isn’t. The Tenth Kingdom has a much simpler, and even more comedic story (though it’s not without drama). It features characters from our world going to the fairytale world and having adventures there, whereas Once Upon A Time features fairytale characters trapped in our world and in general dealing with a different set of challenges.

There are many potential ways you can make an old idea new again. You could take a story that up until his point has only been told from one type of person’s perspective, and tell it from another. You could take a genre that contains a lot of romanticization or unrealistic characterization and write a story for that genre where everyone behaved and responded realistically. Just like Harry Potter did, you could take two or more genres or concepts that aren’t normally put together and write a story based on them. You could take a genre or concept that hasn’t been played around with in a long time and write it in such a way that it’s more accessible to contemporary audiences. You could take a basic plot premise and use it in a genre it hasn’t really been used in before. You could do any combination of the above.

Long story short, it’s not the ideas and elements you use for your story so much as how you use them - as long as they properly fit the world you're writing and people don't feel like they're getting a cheap knockoff or a note-by-note replay of something else, you're probably fine.