Copyright.
- Thread starter Cheapjack
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I had an idea in 1987 that they did in TNG in 1992!
I suppose the thing is to think harder and further ahead to stop this happening!
Its hard if you don't get rewarded for what you've done and it gets harder as you get older. It's hard to do while working, it's amazing that Krad does a novel in two months.
Life is hard, then you die.
I suppose the thing is to think harder and further ahead to stop this happening!
Its hard if you don't get rewarded for what you've done and it gets harder as you get older. It's hard to do while working, it's amazing that Krad does a novel in two months.
Life is hard, then you die.
Just about everyone has had the equivalent experience. Story ideas are a dime a dozen, and any given series premise or character dynamic will naturally suggest certain ideas in multiple people's minds. The single most common reason why TV shows reject pitches from freelance writers is "We're already doing a story like that."
See above. It's impossible to stop it happening, and you're missing the point if you try. Originality isn't in the general concept of your story, it's in the specifics of how you execute it. And if you develop an idea that you can't do because someone's already doing something like it, then you just have to set it aside and come up with a different idea. The trick isn't to try to think "ahead," whatever that means, but to think more broadly, to generate multiple concepts rather than putting all your eggs in one basket.
Thanks for the advice,Christopher, it goes in line with all JMS has said, in his book. By thinking ahead; aren't we all engaged in this wonderful thing called SF, which is basically thinking ahead? I don't understand you. I can think of SF concepts, but I find it more difficult to think of 'character based plot themes', whatever that means.
The point is, you seemed to use "thinking ahead" to mean that you could somehow get ahead of the series' creators (or competing freelancers) in their development of new ideas and thereby prevent duplicating their ideas. Which doesn't make any sense because story generation is not linear, with one story automatically following the next. There are always going to be lots of people with lots of different ideas at any given time, and some of those are going to overlap with your ideas. So it's meaningless to say you can get "ahead" of that. What you need is not to come up with a story idea first, which is pretty much impossible, but to come up with the best way to execute it.
Let me second what Christopher said, but also add: When I was commissioning stories from writers for IDW, the most important thing for me was not just premise, but theme--not just what happens, but what the story's really about. You'd be surprised how many pitches I'd read--nearly all of them, really--that either missed that target, or didn't even know it existed.
Star Trek has always been about the characters as much as the setting, and coming up with an idea or three for an interesting SF story really isn't that difficult for any of us, whether pro writer or fan alike. But coming up with a good theme, that develops out of the characters and changes them in some way by the end of the story--but without, you know, really CHANGING them, which for Trek fiction you're usually not allowed to do--that's much more of a challenge than you might imagine; and as Christopher said, even harder to execute.
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