Writers' Paranoia

Is it a bit like Tennis elbow?

In another thread Lucy wonders why writers are so paranoid and protective about their ideas that they'd worry about meeting up to network with each other.

I once asked a member of another forum why he put his scripts and synopsis on the net? Wasn't he afraid of them being nicked. His response was excellent, so i summarised the email below:

1) Good writers are too busy getting their own ideas onto paper to worry about nicking other people's ideas

2) Only poor writers need to nick an idea and they won't sustain a series on a nicked joke or premise

3) The greatest theives in the biz aren't fellow writers but the producers that we inevitably have to place our ideas before

4) Even our ideas (as original as we like to think they are) are nicked. By that he meant, that we take existing ideas / premises and modify them. The talent comes in what we make of a non-original idea. For example, Lord of the Rings is ripped directly from Aristotle or Plato (A moral tale about a man that has a ring that makes him invisible) Tolkein's genius was in the believable Middle Earth context he created as a vehicle for the 'borrowed' (and i'm being generous with the word 'borrowed') idea

5) Finally (and a brilliant response), he said that when he's finished one idea, he's off writing something hopefully even better. If someone ever nicked an idea, so what? He had plenty of others. It wasn't as if it was the one and only idea he was likely to have. Comedy writers don't have a finite number of gags that once written leave them spent

Hope this helps alleviate all that worry out there in sitcom land.

SlagA

______________________________________________________________ www.welshwriters.org.uk/slaggbrothers - Anarchic Welsh writers www.welshwriters.org.uk/ajdesmond - a new Sci-fi / Humour writer

Good points but I'd still worry that somebody out there could take one of my ideas and do it better than I ever could. It's a deep rooted problem I have.

Quote: Cameron Phillips @ September 4, 2006, 9:19 PM

Good points but I'd still worry that somebody out there could take one of my ideas and do it better than I ever could. It's a deep rooted problem I have.

Yeah, that would be the ultimate insult wouldn't it? someone nicks your sitcom and actually improves it. maybe even emails you to give you some stick for a poorly-developed character!

I suppose because it is a big world, with so many writers, and so many unusual takes on the same stock of ideas, there will always be someone who could (in your own mind) top your original idea. I'm sure even the great writers worry about that.

I like to write alone but IMO writing with a partner is much more fun. nothing beats endless cups of tea and laughing your guts out at one of your ideas taken to another level by your partner, in a way you couldn't have imagined. your idea has effectively been hijacked but a partnership has the pay-off that both of you benefit from it.

I know i've strayed from the original point (a straight nick with no credit). I guess it's the writers' equivalent of parasitic and symbiotic.

Forgot to say SlagA that I thought your original post with the arguments against writer's paranoia was brilliant.

Ultimately, we'd never send our stuff anywhere if we were that bothered. "God, no, I don't want you to make a sitcom of it. Then everyone will see it and a film producer might steal it..."