Therapy for Thieves: Why Telling an Original Story is Tricky 

(Contains spoilers for The Hunger Games and Battle Royale) 

Can I pitch you my latest novel? 

It’s about a group of teenagers chosen through a lottery by the government. They’re pitted against each other in a fight to the death as a form of punishment for citizen misbehavior, and one lucky finalist is to be rewarded with their life. They’re trapped in a forest, tracked and listened to. Each competitor is given limited supplies to work with, and the champion of a fight from a previous year mentors my protagonist. My big twist is that there’s two winners instead of one, and by the end, the government is on their tail for bending the rules. 

Also they like each other. 

It can feel like a death game when you’re finally brave enough to share your writing: everyone chasing your work across workshop tables and literary journals, stabbing it with pointy Bics and Pilot-G2s until it bleeds red with ink. Your only defense is your feeble word, if you’re allowed it. 

The most brutal ego death of all, though, is finding out an author with a ten-year head start on you has a gun to your head, loaded with “I did it first!” 

So imagine my surprise when I found out Suzanne Collins stole my idea and renamed it The Hunger Games in 2008. I was only 5 years old, what could I have done? Later, I learned that Koshun Takami did the same thing back in 1999… snatched it out of my hands before I was even born and called it Battle Royale. Real cruel of them to ruin my career so young. 

Jokes aside, the timestamps might have you wondering: is it possible that Collins copied Takami? Takami has yet to speak on it, but Collins denies the accusation. In fact, when Quentin Tarantino and others started pointing fingers at her, she said she’d never even heard of Battle Royale and that her main inspiration for The Hunger Games was from late night channel surfing between news clips of war and reality television on her couch. Battle Royale was also conjured on a couch, when Takami was drifting to sleep and got the sudden mental image of a deranged school teacher he’d seen on television once. 

What is it with couch potatoes and death games? 

Really, this kind of coincidence is inevitable. Authors have been recycling ideas forever, whether intentionally or not. In fact, according to Christopher Booker, there’s only seven basic plots to go around. These cycles come to be because writing always involves drawing on something you’ve experienced. 

And no, I don’t just mean the “original life experiences” we claim we don’t have enough of (you can excuse yourself from writing all day with that one). I mean the readers, watchers, listeners. Couch potatoes, too. Enjoyers of good writing always have something good to write about. Why should you expect your own brainstorms to not be influenced? If we combine the writing we love with new elements, we always end up with something fresh. 

Still, it’s hard to break from the “but it was my idea” mentality. No matter how hard you try not to, you will always be able to draw connections between your work and others, and you will always hate yourself a little more when you do. If you hate yourself enough, eventually you kill the passion for your passion project. 

So feed that energy back into your piece. While “true” originality is tricky, we come closer to it the more we build on our work. What parts of your work felt like your own when you started it? These are the most important bits, because they were written free from the mental traps you’ve set for yourself. Don’t focus so much on whether your storyline is too close to another. Instead, ask yourself: what are you bringing to this particular storyline? 

I’m definitely no advocate for plagiarism, and no true writer ever aspired to create unoriginal content. If you didn’t copy someone verbatim, chances are you don’t have too much to worry about. 

With all that said, it doesn’t matter if you believe Collins or not. Each author still took a specific plotline and developed it into something completely different and uniquely theirs, filling the gaps with their personal voice, commentary, character arcs, and all the other wonderful little details in between. 

And the world received two more great stories because of it, right?