Write Better: Tips and tricks

Will someone steal my idea?

If you're nervous about someone stealing your idea:

1. The odds are very low that someone would want  take your idea. Most writers are writers because they have their own stories they want to tell. There's a very good chance that the thief has got their own headaches and stories and ideas filling up all their time and energy. 

Put simply: most writers have too much going on to be bothered with another writer's ideas.

2.  The odds are astronomically low that someone will take your idea and turn it into the exact same novel you're writing. Writers don't all write the same.  That's where things like style come into play and let us tell different writers apart. On top of that, we treat ideas differently. Give a group of ten writers a prompt like: girl meets boy at a supermarket. You'll get ten different stories. Make it more specific, add that it must involve an orange. You'll still get ten different stories based off the same idea.

3. The odds are equally as low that you have an idea that is in no way similar to something someone else is writing or already has written.  As we so often hear, "There are no new ideas." When you reduce stories or scenes down to a paragraph or less, you're going to find that a lot of stories sound the same, especially if you trim them down into their tropes and cliches. This is especially true when you're writing fiction in established genres. Whatever your idea is, some version of it has likely been done before. 

Harry Potter, for example, isn't the first and won't be the last story about a wizarding school. Anita Blake and Bella Swan both have vampire and werewolf love interests.

If you look at a lot of popular books, a quick search  will yield all kinds of "SO&SO STOLE FROM THIS STORY." If you look further into some lawsuits brought against stories, you'll quickly find that in some cases, Nancy probably never read Bill's unpopular story from thirty years ago. She just happened to also write a story focused on a penguin living with fishermen in Belize. 

4. You have a head start to the finish line. Unless you've got a prolific writer on your tail (let's face it, if Stephen King came after you,  the first draft is already in his editor's hands) you are already farther along than the person trying to steal your idea. There's a very good chance that, depending on what you want to do with your story, you'll be first published, which means your written story with all its details will attain some level of copyright protection that can help protect you, so get writing!

5. You cannot copyright an idea. Per the Copyright Act, "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated or embodied in such work."

This one's kind of important. You can love it all you want and never tell a soul about it, but those tricksy hobbitses can come along and use it, too!

6. Even if someone steals your idea, they still have to be successful with it, and that's incredibly difficult. So maybe your story idea gets stolen by another user. They, like you, think a tale about an aging cheese curl in the back seat of a soccer mom's mini van is going to be the next Hunger Games. The thief has to still:

A. Write the book.

B. Attract readers and/or an agent and/or a publisher.

C. Make some kind of a financial splash.

D. Get noticed by you or someone who knows your story.

Basically, IF lightning strikes and someone steals your idea, it is more likely that you will never know they did! Most thieves won't make it out of A. Of the ones that do, they'll probably get crushed somewhere in B and never achieve C or D. In general most writers don't get out of A or B!