Forum: Author Hangout

Perhaps he has trouble developing characters and chose to borrow some?

The hardest part in any story is creating characters that people can relate to, and establishing motives which drive the characters. If you can't do that, it's much easier to simply steal the entire character creation part, and just jump to the 'what happened after that' phase.

Isn't that exactly what fan fiction is?

Fan fiction is hardly legal, instead it's allowed, in many instances, mainly because it's SO difficult to stop. In general, as long as you don't spoil the author's revenue stream by spoiling his next book, you can generally get away with it, but you need to check the specific author to see whether they're the more litigious sorts. Certain genres are more likely to support fan fiction than others, for instance.

You also need to check the publisher. Disney is very protective of it's image as a purveyor of children's/family entertainment. They have thrown chicken fits over "adult" fan fiction stories based on their animated films.

You're right, of course. I should have said "copyright holder", as often, the original author frequently gets shafted sooner or later.

P.S. As someone who had many SOHO artist friends while living in Manhattan, I can tell you quite a few terrifying stories regarding Disney's baseless attacks against artists in general. The law in definitely on the artists side, but Disney's approach is to throw twenty suits for a single work, so the artist has no choice but to comply before it ever reaches a decision (which will only affect a single case).