paranoia

I spent part of last weekend working on a short piece for a contest.  I think my primary reason for doing so was to see if I could DO it, lol.  Writing very short stories is a challenge, and requires discipline—something I don’t require from myself often enough.

At one point in the story, I wrote a line I really liked.  What the line was is pretty irrelevant.  What’s important is that I really, really liked this sentence.  I typed it with my keyboard.  I printed it out.  Pared it down, because there was a word limit.  STILL loved it.  Read it aloud in the context of the rest of the story, and it tasted good on my TONGUE (a good test, BTW).  I was HAPPY with that sentence, almost excited about it.  (And if that sounds strange, just think about how many movies you’ve seen in which one line of dialogue stayed with you long after the film was over.)  It was that kind of sentence to me.

And then it happened.
Then it began to creep over me, a cold, needling chill that rapidly progressed to nauseating panic…

HAD I READ THAT SENTENCE SOMEWHERE BEFORE????? :shock:

Gawd.  It was a GOOD sentence.  Was it TOO good?  Was this something I’d pulled out of thin air without effort?  Or was it good because I’d read it in someone else’s work and subconsciously thought, “Damn that’s good!”, and squirreled it away somewhere in the dark, hungry-hack recesses of my mind?  Was it in a book?  A line of poetry?  Somewhere on the world(sob!)-wide Internet?  Was it possible I might’ve even stolen a whole passage, maybe a paragraph?! :sad:

I set the story aside.  I thought, pondered, strained, reached back over the years to everything I could ever remember reading that was remotely similar.  I did dishes, mopped floors, finished the income tax forms, shoveled snow, letting my mind wander all over my warped psyche as I worked.
Nothing.  Nada.  If I’d read it somewhere, I just couldn’t remember. :no:

I decided I should delete the line.  It was a short fiction piece, written for fun.  After all I’d read recently about plagiarism, crediting, footnotes, copying—was it really worth the risk, after all?

Damn right it was.  I loved that sentence.
I left the sonofabitch in place.

How sad is it that such a thing should ever even OCCUR to a writer who’s not consciously trying to steal from someone?!

So if you’re out there, and I happened to have picked up on your sentence-vibes…
Sorry.
Sue me.
You won’t get much.
But I’m keeping my sentence.  So there. :wootrock:

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