Read them all. Loved them. The characters are extremely realistic. I’m jealous, really I am. I want to steal your ideas so badly (but won’t of course).
Hi Cpt_Life,
As long as you don’t copy+paste text, I don’t think you should feel bad about “stealing” ideas. Stealing memes, stories, and characters is a time-honoured tradition, and even the stories in the Bible are in effect various tales that circulated all around the Near East, and were constantly enhanced, improved, and incorporated into larger epics. Some of my own stories are crazy crossovers/mash-ups of various characters, plot elements, ideas, concepts, and phrases from various sources: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead , the Bastard Operator from Hell, the “Friends” television series, Buffy, Star Trek The-Next-Generation/Deep-Space-9, Dumas’ The Three Musketeers , Illuminati and Elders of Zion conspiracy theories, the television show Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Sesame Street, the film The Princess Bride , the Jewish Bible and the Jewish “Midrash” (= “to study”, “to investigate”), etc. etc.
If you look at the wikipedia entry for Milady de-Winter —who is featured in Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (and is a truly formidable, resourceful, and awe-inspiring antagonist—and as a result a very attractive and captivating character), you can see that he borrowed her from characters by previous writers about this. Back in the 19th century, copyright only applied to texts, not to characters or concepts or worlds in the story, and I have decided to place all of my original things of those under CC-by.
I’m not saying you should do blatant plagiarism, but you should feel free to incorporate some of those in different variations in your stories. Ideas can not be copyrighted—only patented, and patents on such non-tangible things such as software, business practices, or on storylines or plots (see this Slashdot.org post titled “USPTO Issues Provisional Storyline Patent” ) are absurd and given the current United States patent regime, are hard to avoid, and you probably should not worry about them.
Regards,
– Shlomi Fish (a.k.a “Rindolf”).
Shlomif is right. Every author is influenced by what they’ve read. Mistborn was deeply influenced by my love of heist movies, and you can trace where characters came from if you watch enough of them. Let yourself be inspired by what you read, just make sure to take your own spin on it.
Thanks for reading!
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