 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here my name is Jackie, I'm an aspiring writer and lately I have been thinking about plagiarism or when plagiarism stops being plagiarism. So to take a step back into what brought me to this ramble, a couple of years ago I was listening to the Story Grid podcast and Sean Coyne who's the founder of like the Story Grid website and wrote the book in the start of the podcast. He did a 10 episode series I think called the Master Worth Experiment which I found incredibly fascinating. The idea was that you could select a piece of work that you thought was a master work so something that was perfection and you could dissect it and figure out all of the key beats and character arcs and so on and once you dissected it you could then transplant that to create a template for a new story so you could follow all of the exact same beats, the same character journeys but if you changed like the setting and the time and the writing style and the writer obviously you could have the same beats but it would essentially be a new unique piece of work and I am someone who loves structure, I love templates, I love guidelines. If you've seen my I Tried Plotting Like series you'll know that I'm a big fan of trying all of these methods and as soon as I heard this I thought you know that was real that is really interesting and I'd love to pick a piece of work that I love and try picking it apart and see if this works and if the piece that comes out at the end of it is something truly original. In this series they were using short story Breakback Mountain and it was quite interesting to listen to the conversation happening back and forth and the author who I believe was Anne Hawley she actually shared a pdf with her working document. Now unfortunately I don't think the story ever was finished so we can't see what the end result was of this experiment but the idea still stayed with me. Combined this with a few weeks ago I started playing the Final Fantasy 7 remake and it is an incredibly beautiful game it's just stunning to look at but I'm not loving it to be honest and admittedly I never played the original Final Fantasy 7 so I'm not sure how much it deviates from that but in the remake I feel like I don't actually know what the story is I know there's some corporation that's producing energy I guess in a way that's killing the planet and the people we're following are like eco-terrorists who want to take this company down but beyond that vague like overall thing there are no really clear goals or things that we're going towards it's sort of just a little mission at a time so oh we're blowing up this reactor let's get in and get out and we need to get from this sector to this one that'll take an hour because there are so many puzzles and things to figure out so there's so much that's distracting you on the way that you lose sight of what the big story is if there is in fact a big story like yes I need to go from one place to another but I don't actually know why anymore and that's incredibly frustrating to me now like I said I never played the original so I don't know if the original was also like that or if the remakes just like that because they've tried to flesh it out so much that they've got a lot of filler in there that doesn't contribute to the main plot so this then got me thinking about Final Fantasy 10 which is the first and only actual Final Fantasy game I've played all the way through and I played that back in I think 2005 so it had come out a couple of years before and I remember loving it I loved it so much that I played it through and I got to the end and I immediately played it through again and I couldn't stop watching like videos of the cut scenes online and what I loved about it was the story and so when I was playing with Final Fantasy 7 Remake I thought you know 10 had a much better story and what if I tried turning that into a book like what if I did the masterwork experiment and broke it down and then tried to create an original story that followed the same beats and the same structure and this brings us to today's topic which is when does plagiarism stop being plagiarism because if I want to retell the story of these characters in book form fine that is not an original piece of work though like if I'm taking the characters in the world and the story but if I change the character names and change the world and change some elements of the story is that enough to make it a unique piece of work or is something that sticks to the beats of another story always going to be an imitation of the original story and then from a legal standpoint like let's say I got to the end of this thing and was really proud of the piece of work I'd done and then wanted to sell it is this something that's sellable or is it plagiarism and one of the things that makes me think of is fanfiction because fanfiction often does this like they're not taking the original story but they're taking the original world characters and building on them and the reason that fanfiction is seen as like morally justifiable is because fanfiction authors aren't then going and selling those stories to publishers they are not making money off someone else's IP then we get into things like 50 shades of gray where someone did write a piece of fanfiction it got so popular that they got interest from publishers they did a control f search of their work and changed bella and edward to anastasia and christian I think and then essentially sold that as if it was a piece of unique work and I haven't actually read 50 shades of gray but my understanding is it doesn't actually like it obviously it doesn't have vampires in it I know that it has btsm but I don't actually think it follows the plot of twilight at all beyond these people meet each other and start a relationship so you could argue that yes it is in a unique piece of work now but it was inspired by someone else's work so does that mean it comes under the umbrella of plagiarism and should el james be making profits from something that was inspired by someone else's IP or is this a case of you know stealing like an artist where you take inspiration from something and then once you've changed it enough and turned it into your own thing it is legitimately a unique piece of work and therefore there is no moral issue with you making an income or a profit off that unique piece of work and even if we move away from fanfiction and specifically taking ideas from other pieces of work in order to jump start a new piece of work what about the fact that there are no unique stories what about the fact that there are certain genres with certain tropes and expectations I mean if we go back to story grid and you look at the story grid blog there are articles on secrets of different genres so secrets of the action genre secrets of the romance genre secrets of the thriller genre and each of those break down the key conventions of the genre but they even list key scenes that are expected in books of that type but just because I have one thriller here and one thriller here and both of them happen to have similar scenes that doesn't mean I've got a plagiarism issue that's conventions of the genre so how does that work into things you know if there are no original stories if every fantasy book is going to be some iteration of the hero's journey is plagiarism still relevant so I don't have an answer to this debate it is something I've been thinking about just because this morning I did finish revising powerless and I sent it off to my friend who's doing a book coaching course which means it is time to start thinking about the next project and because I've been struggling with new projects I thought maybe like doing this masterwork experiment maybe taking another story dissecting it and trying to create something original from that skeleton maybe that would be a good way to get started and to work those writing muscles which I still think is valid I think it's an interesting idea to do this as a writing experiment but what happens at the end and whether it's this specific example or you've found yourself in the same position where you've started with some fan fiction or you've started inspired by someone else's work what happens when you get to the end and it turns out you wrote something that you think is really cool do you then have a right to publish it and market it should you just put it on Kindle for free because it isn't your original IP and therefore you shouldn't be making money from it or should you send it to publishers and see what they think and see if they notice the similarity between the two pieces of work like if I end up going ahead with this should I send my Final Fantasy 10 rip off out to agents and publishers and then ask them to play Final Fantasy 10 to see how similar they think they are so I have no idea but I would love to hear your thoughts so let me know what you think about where the boundaries between what is and what isn't plagiarism end let me know what you think about when it is appropriate to make money from a project that has taken some inspiration from someone else so please let me know what you think in the comments below and if there is an interesting discussion in the comments maybe that means we have a part two of this video that gets into more specifics rather than just Jackie rambling off the top of her head so I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give me a big thumbs up subscribe hit the notification bell and I will see you next time bye