Hi Darren, Oh, there is nothing wrong with inspiration in of itself. The problem Dark and I are talking about here is taking story x and simply replacing names of people, places, and things and sticking new labels on them. In a case like that it is not an original idea inspired by an existing one, but merely a case of renaming everything to keep from being busted for copyright infringement.
For example, what if I created a character named Panama Jack, gave him a hat and whip, and a girl friendnamed Marianne Summers. Now, right off the top of your head you probably would have guessed I'm thinking of Indiana Jones and Marianne Ravenwood under new aliases, and you'd be absolutely correct. What's the problem with that? Well, the problem is I didn't spend any time on developing my own characters. All I did is create a cookie cutter copy of Indiana Jones and Marianne Ravenwood and slapped them in some kind of treasure hunt. It would be more interesting in my opinion to sit down and develop a new cast of characters with their own personalities, own back story, and values different from those that the author was inspired by. Instead of an Indiana Jones type character we can give our Panama Jack character a more unique back story. What if Jack was born and raised in Australia, served in the military, and went to college for archeology in the U.S. before obtaining a teaching position at some ivy league university. Since his training in the special forces maybe he packs a pistol and of course is an expert at hand to hand fighting. This would establish his qualifications for the story. All we then need to do is fill in the enemies who might be in a power struggle for some kind of ancient artifacts. Bottom line, the more information I layer on my character the less and less he is a duplicate of Indiana Jones. The original idea might have been an Indiana Jones character, but fleshing out my own character would make a more interesting and unique storyline over all. Cheers! On 8/11/12, Darren Harris <[email protected]> wrote: > hi tom. > > personally, i don't see anything wrong with being inspired by other tv > series. to be inspired isn't to copy as long as it's done in a way that > shows it's your own work. i mean, what's the difference between a tele > porter, transporter or transmat beam? > > however if you want a bit of original science fiction i can point you in the > right direction. try the commonwealth series. first starting with pandora's > star. you should find it on audible. also stormwarden that's the start of > another series. both very cleverly written. either of those books should > help to add some additional ideas there. > > Sent from my iPad --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
