Is there an original thought?

Has this happened to you? You just finish writing your own Grapes of Wrath and you sit down to celebrate your victory. You are now thinking about getting an agent and selling your manuscript to the highest bidder. Next thing you know, you turn on the T.V. to find that your original thought was somehow stolen from you head while you were sleeping. Don’t believe me? Check out the boards on Internet Movie Data base or IMDB.com.

Next thing you know, your going out of your brain trying to figure out why this has happened. What will you do? People will think you’re a dirty rotten plagiarist; you will never get work again.

Don’t worry. It happens to all of us. Take a look it one of my favorite authors. Gene Brewer author of K-PAX, on a beam of light and worlds of Prot. Before the screenplay of his book K-PAX made it to the big screen there was a movie made before he wrote K-PAX called “A man facing Southwest.” It was a B- movie. But nonetheless here they came out of the woodwork yelling on the mountaintops “That man stole my story.”

Or we could look at Dan Brown with his book The Da Vinci Code. Another author clams that Brown outright plagiarized his entire novel. However none of these authors has ever been taken to trial and beat. No rule of law can govern your mind.

Someone once wrote, “Thought is free.” You see there are original ideas they start with you.