It's still funny to me that John Fogerty was sued by his former label for plagiarizing himself. For those of you who don't know about this, his former bandmates argued that the riff he wrote for "The Old Man Down the Road" sounded too close to some of the riffs he wrote for CCR, specifically "Run Through the Jungle." The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that is not illegal for someone to sound too much like himself, and Fogerty won the lawsuit. If you haven't read about it, you should. It sounds like a chapter straight out of Catch-22.

My point is that you are allowed to steal your own ideas. In fact, I strongly recommend doing it, whether you've created something awesome in a story that just didn't work, or something awesome in a story that did.

Salvaging the good from the bad

I mentioned Igor's Inn in one of my earlier articles. When I first starting writing, I was determined to create a trilogy out of a character named Topher and his crazy adventures. I decided to set Igor's Inn immediately after the first one. Topher and his friends arrive in an unnamed town meaning only to stay the night, but become enmeshed in something the townspeople refer to as "The Gauntlet." They soon realize that, a la "Hotel California," they are stuck in the town forever. Essentially, they wind up having to compete in series of ridiculous games. There's a rock climbing event with little homunculi attacking the competitors, and there's some kind of gladiatorial Battle Royale. The final race basically entails the competitors trying to outrun the townspeople, who have been armed with a variety of axes, pickaxes, shovels, and other blunt instruments. If they catch anyone, they kill them. When Topher and his team end up winning the whole competition, they're escorted into the basement of the hotel in which they were staying (the titular Igor's Inn) to collect their prize, and led down an endless flight of stairs all the way to Hell.

Actually, I might have to revisit that idea.

No, no, no. Never mind. It didn't work back then and I've moved on to other projects. Besides, I've already followed my own advice and scavenged the best parts, specifically the idea of "The Gauntlet." I liked the idea so much (the prize being nearly as brutal and ironic as Tessie Hutchinson's lottery earnings) that I transformed it into the penultimate scene in Burn All The Bodies, the final book in the Topher Trilogy.

Recycling the good

Many of my favorite authors like to connect the worlds of their individual books, sometimes to great effect, sometimes to not-so-great effect. Stephen King revisits Derry in a lot of his work, and characters and events from one story or novel are mentioned in another. Captain Trips first shows up in the short story "Night Surf" from his short story collection, Night Shift; later on it figures prominently in the novel The Stand. I liked that association. He also attempted to blur the lines between books in the Dark Tower series by adding Randall Flagg (from The Stand) to the plot, and allowing the Gunslinger to jump back and forth into worlds that are similar to the ones in his past work. Sometimes it worked for me. Sometimes it felt forced.

David Mitchell also connects the worlds between his works. Cloud Atlas is crawling with crossover characters, at least one of whom shows up in Black Swan Green. He also connected the world of The Bone Clocks (a novel I did not love) to nearly every book he's written so far, then wrote Slade House (a novella I absolutely loved), based on the ideas in The Bone Clocks. His meta-references, because he either planned them, or because of a little serendipity, work well.

I've always liked this idea. I tried it out in a novel I attempted to write in college, which was, of course, terrible. I can't remember the plot, but there were talking squirrels and sentient forks, and I haven't been confident enough, or experienced enough, in my writing to try it. I think I've finally been able to make it work in my latest novel, The Rabbit, The Jaguar, & The Snake. I used the alien setting of two of my short stories, "The Unan" and "Savages" (which I published in You Will Be Safe Here) and, to make things even knottier, I added the main town in "Salvation" (which I published in A Knife in the Back) to "The Unan". It, too, is mentioned in The Rabbit, The Jaguar, & The Snake (as well as another short story, "City of Salt"), and I'm thinking of making it more prominent in the sequel. In fact, as the next few books in the series are published, I also plan on revealing references to and events from "The Unan" and "Savages".

The challenge will be to intertwine them in a way that doesn't make them seem like throw-away references, and to use details from the short stories in a way that adds to the plot of the novels.

So what's my point? I have two:

Don't give up on good or ideas just because they didn't work the first time around. Being an author requires persistence, and persistence doesn't just mean seeing a creative project to completion, it also means harvesting everything you create, even if the initial packaging was subpar.
If it makes sense, have fun with your stories by seeing if you can recycle old settings and ideas in new books. Steal from yourself. If it wasn't already evident, even the supreme court says it's legal!
Next up:

Writing Tip #2: Use a strong character in another story

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A monster terrorizes an isolated village in the mountains of Eastern Europe, draining the blood of its victims, leaving them frozen in the snow. The villagers hunt wolves, decapitate “vampires,” but the murders continue. As each new body is found, the residents grow more and more paranoid. Who will be next? Will it ever end?