The Debate about Art

One man's trash is another man's treasure. All agreed that's an old expression? Any naysayers? Good. Now here's a question: what if it's another man's treasure but his use for it has been fulfilled. What if another man picks up said treasure and incorporates it into his own treasure?

One of my ideas for The Orchard Boy Series is to have one storyline in each novella revolving around a character who is continued from the end of another story. A famous story (or, usually, a not-so-famous story; let's say a published story instead). I just have reservations about this. Here are my reasons:

1. Is it considered plagiarism? It's not taking someone's words and making them my own, and it's not really taking someone's idea and making it my own, but it is taking someone's character and essentially making it my own. I know a lot of people have done this - most recently I can recall March by Geraldine Brooks, which takes up the story of what Mr. March from Little Women was doing during his youth and while he was away from his family. This book won the Pulitzer Prize.

2. A lot of people have been doing this lately, so will it be like jumping on a bandwagon? The idea came to me when I was thinking about an old short story I read long ago, and how the ending to that story was ambivalent, and imagining that ending and what happened to the characters, and then re-imagining that ending to have gone in a more fantastic direction.

3. The idea will also play off of another of my favorite series - The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King. In the first book, The Gunslinger, one of the characters dies (again) and says, as he dies, "There are other worlds than these." In a sense, he is saying he will live on in another world, in another fantasy. He can be brought back. Is it okay to play off of this idea? Maybe King would love that - the continuation of his idea. That he inspired someone's creativity.

I think it's hard to answer all of these questions, and at the same time, I think all of these questions have already been answered. Countless characters show up in other people's novels, and sometimes it turns out beautifully. I suppose it's true that there are about nineteen archetypes for a story and we just retell them, over and over, so it can't really matter anymore. There are only six real emotions (love, hate, fear, joy, grief, and surprise). It's how we decide to utilize those emotions, how we tell those stories, how we grow those characters that make them unique though they are really ubiquitous.