: Re: How to assure your plot isn't a carbon copy of another story? In what case is it justifiable for your own story to differentiate its plot from another, similar plot? For instance, I'm writing

@Annie587

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I have not seen "Saw" so I can't comment on the details you refer to. But in general:

This is all a matter of degree. Unless you're exceptionally creative, it's likely that any story you write will fall into one of a pretty small number of common categories: romance, murder mystery, coming-of-age, time travel, etc.

There's a sense in which you could say that every romance story is "another Romeo & Juliet rip-off". There's a sense in which you could say that every murder mystery follows the same basic plot line: a murder is committed, the brilliant detective is called to investigate, there are some red herrings that lead him to suspect the wrong person, then he catches the real murderer, the end. Etc.

If you're worried that your story is just like somebody else's because they're both about a criminal trying to outwit a brilliant detective, and that's about the extent of the similarity, I wouldn't worry about it for a moment.

If you're worried that your story is just like somebody else's because the crime is almost identical, the criminals in both stories have very similar personalities, the crucial clue that leads to him being caught is pretty much the same thing, etc, then you have a problem.

You COULD go throw the details and start making changes to make your story different. If there were just one or two details that were two obviously the same, I'd do that. But if there are many points of similarity, and you really must admit that you got the whole idea for your story from reading/watching the other, then I think you need to go back and come up with SOME very fundamental idea that makes yours different. Make it an idea that has implications throughout the story. Not just, "Well I'll set mine in Los Angeles instead of New York and so all the street names will be different." But, "While his villain works hard to conceal his crime from the police, I'll make my villain flaunt his crime before the police and dare them to catch him".

Frankly, I think if you start out saying, "I really liked such-and-such story, I'd like to write one just like it", you're going about it wrong. You should be trying to be original, not a clone. It's one thing to say to find that as you develop your story, it's getting too much like some other story you know, and you need to make some changes so it doesn't sound like a clone. It's quite another to deliberately set out to make a clone and look for the minimum set of differences to throw people off.

(If you're writing a script for a TV show or movie, disregard the above paragraph. I understand that in Hollywood, the goal is to pick some popular TV show or movie and copy it, on the reasoning that if the original was popular, your clone should be popular too. Hollywood has this idea -- maybe it works for them, it seems pretty dumb to me -- that what makes a story popular is not creativity, originality, and smart writing, but rather a collection of surface plot elements. Like I read that after the Harry Potter movies were successful, some Hollywood exec concluded that this meant that Americans wanted to see movies "about British school children" and so began a couple of such projects. I remember when "Star Wars" proved popular, we quickly saw a rash of unoriginal movies about wars in space. Etc.)

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