: Re: I want to use the premise of a story that I think wasted its potential, can I do this? I have been pondering on a novel idea that would likely utilize a large chunk of a premise of a

@Annie587

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If you're concerned about copyright violation, not a problem, this is completely legal. Ideas are not and can not be copyrighted, only the exact words or pictures or other means of expression used to convey those ideas. As long as you are only copying a general idea, like "magical detective solving magical crimes", and not the specific words that the original writer used, you are perfectly legal.
Whether it's a good idea is another question. If you follow the original author's writing too closely, people might well consider your writing an unimaginative rip-off. Whenever there's a popular movie, you can always count on a dozen other movies coming out that are obviously lame attempts to copy the success of the original.
That said, I hear many original writers panic unnecessarily that people will think they're copying from some other story. "I'm writing a story where a couple fall in love but then they face all kinds of problems that keep them apart. Will people say that I'm copying from Romeo and Juliet?" That depends on just how similar your story is. Just because two people fall in love in your story doesn't make it a rip-off of Romeo and Juliet. Likewise, just because you have a magical detective doesn't make your story a rip-off of this other story.
Here's the practical tip I would give you: If you find yourself struggling to find ways to make your story different, that is, if your first draft is very similar to the inspiration and you have to go back and change things to make it different, then it's probably too similar. You're not taking the same basic idea and heading off in a different direction. You're heading in the same direction and trying to find a detour here and there. But if you take someone else's basic idea and putting a spin on it that is totally your own, yeah, that's how creativity works. Few people are creative enough to invent an entirely new genre. Most of us try to explore a new variation within a genre. (Well, some writers are happy to recycle the same old ideas and just rearrange them a little, but that's a different story.)

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