Ripping yourself off

[Kessie]

Say you're writing along, and you come up against a bit of a wall in your story. So you just take something that you've done in a previous story, stick it in, and go along with the rest of the story.

You've just ripped off one of your own ideas and recycled it.

I've seen authors do this over and over. They seem to be obsessed with certain ideas, and explore them over and over.

Eric Nylund loves the idea of an AI trying to run multiple copies of itself until it goes insane (or a person doing the same thing).

Robin Hobb adores memories and their storage and transference to other people.

I wrote about mind control so many times in my fanfics that people starting asking why I was so interested in it, and I hadn't even noticed it was a habit.

How do you avoid writing the same thing over and over? If you enjoy something, you tend to revisit it, but after a while it seems like you're ripping off your own writing.

Has anybody else had this experience, or noticed it in an author's writing?

[waldenwriter]

For me it's mostly re-using character names, like Jack or Jennifer. Though I do tend to write about loners or introverted people, but that's probably because I'm one.

I've also noticed that I have written a few stories where the protagonist (usually female) had issues with her parents, usually her mother, or with a parent figure. Darkly Bound is one, as are a novel, short story, and a comic script I wrote in high school and my background info for a story I wrote last semester for my Writing Process class. Though again, this may just be some Mary Jane-ing at work again; I'm closer to my dad than I am to my mom.

[pixydust]

I find I do this with imagery and not realize it until I've started editing. Oops. Some gestures and word patterns get stuck in our flow and it's just apart of the process. Always can be fixed in edit, that's what I say.

[celesta]

I actually don't mind it. Ever notice that the same character with a different name shows up in different books by the same author? I like it actually. If I liked them in the last book I like them again in the new setting/world. Same with ideas. Some ideas are just so cool they need to be explored over and over!

I think the only way it would be a problem is if it wasn't a very interesting idea to begin with or if the situation requires some element of surprise for the audience. Like they run into a particular kind of trap. That would be silly to use again in different books.

I don't really know how to stop reusing ideas but I think many ideas can be used over and over without boring a reader.