: Re: On copyright infringement and plagiarism So, I'm writing a novella about this guy named Peter, who is an actor living in LA. In the fall, he comes back to his hometown, a small town in New

First: Copyright protects the exact words (or pictures or sounds) used in a creative work. If you copy somebody else's story word-for-word, or copy large sections of it, that is copyright infringement and you can be sued. But you do not own a copyright to a general idea. There was a court cases years ago where a newspaper took stories out of another newspaper, rewrote them in their own words, and published them. The courts said that does NOT violate copyright.

It can be plagiarism to copy someone else's ideas without giving credit. But this is an academic violation. It applies to stealing the results of someone else's research, not to writing a fiction story. If someone talks about plagiarizing a fiction story, he's using the word "plagiarize" as a metaphor or an analogy. It's not really plagiarism.

So there are no legal issues here. Period.

It may be that if your story is very similar to someone else's story, that people will think your story is unoriginal. New writers routinely panic when they see even the vaguest similarity between their story and someone else's. Calm down, take a deep breath. If the only similarity between your story and this other person's story is that they are both romances, they both have a scene with a bonfire, and they both have a scene where a guy spies on a girl naked ... there must be thousands of stories that fit that description. Don't worry about it.

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: Create looping patterns within the dialog, such as the order that people speak, and little mannerisms within their speech. Then repeat the pattern a few times. You don't need to be too rigid

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: Re: On copyright infringement and plagiarism So, I'm writing a novella about this guy named Peter, who is an actor living in LA. In the fall, he comes back to his hometown, a small town in New

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: Create looping patterns within the dialog, such as the order that people speak, and little mannerisms within their speech. Then repeat the pattern a few times. You don't need to be too rigid

: Dialog problems with a character with only one name? I have a character who starts as a low servant caste and rises up through society. While plotting, I never bothered to give her more than

: How do I ratchet down expectations in a genre that seems to have gone gonzo? I've done worldbuilding and extensive plotting for a Book 1 based around a "detective" (not a literal detective

: Archetype or Stereotype? After feedback on character design for my visual novel, my grizzled Noir Detective is drifting into an Old Jazz Musician. There's a reason I post the artwork: what

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