Plagiarism?

It's not bad. As you said, you had your idea before you ever knew the other story existed. Not only is overthrowing the government different from killing trait positive girls, if you sat and thought (or looked around if you can't think of anything you've personally seen like them) you could probably come up with other stories of people overthrowing the government or using/killing people with certain traits for their own benefit.

As long as you aren't lifting the plot or certain parts of the story--as long as you are fully writing your own story--it's not plagiarism.

Avangyline, fear_and_faith

Thank you! That has been bothering me for a while :)

Here's the thing. Even if you followed the entire plot point by point, it would still not be plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking another person's words and passing them off as your own. Ideas cannot be copyrighted. Plots cannot be copyrighted. And a damned good thing, too, because there's only so many plots to go around, and while you can spice them up a bit by changing some of the details, everything boils down to the same few basic plots.

But does that mean every book out there is the same? Is every horror movie that uses the basic premise of "some people are stuck in a place and being picked off one by one by a horrible monster/vampire/werewolf/alien/axe murderer/etc" identical and completely unoriginal? Not at all. You know what? When it comes down to it, readers don't even want "origininality". They just want something they can enjoy.

Title: Breaking Light
Goal: Finishing this novel. (Probably be 100k-120k at this rate.)
Sanity level: Do you even need to ask?

Also plagiarism is an intentional act. It's not something you can do accidentally. If you write a story that's very similar to someone else's story, but you've never read or heard about that other story then that's neither plagiarism or copying, it's just coincidence.

I've watched LG15 since the beginning and I don't think the plots are similar.

The only similarities I see is a female character who goes on the computer and an organization.

Thanks to you all for helping me :)

While I agree that if you have never heard or read another's story, you can't plagiarize it, I would (after 20 years of teaching) disagree that plagiarism is always an intentional act. I have seen quite a bit of unintentional plagiarism in my day -- esp. the type which includes close paraphrase of another's ideas rather than verbatim copying.

OTOH, overall plot lines sometimes just seem to be universal. The Iliad, Hamlet, the Lion King are all the same story at the core -- though how they were fleshed out make them very different and worthwhile in their own way. There was a Russian Scholar named Propp who in fact believe there was only a very limited number of core stories told in a variety of ways around the world.

I think you'll find this article, written by Orson Scott Card, to be quite helpful:

On Plagiarism, Borrowing, Resemblance, and Influence

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Heather Dudley
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