Scouting for the Reaper by Jacob M. Appel

In my forthcoming novel, The Biology of Luck, guru Ziggy Borasch has written a book titled Fate, Fluke & Happenstance that seeks to disprove the concept of coincidence.

Yet what I emphasize to my students is that their fears are unfounded. I have even had students inform me directly, “I’m not going to bring my novel to workshop, because I’m afraid someone else will use my ideas.” Needless to say, such prophylactic secrecy prevents many a promising manuscript from receiving the feedback it deserves. In my many years leading an introductory fiction course for adults, the most frequent question I am asked on day one-either at the end of the class session or, more often, in private-is, How can I keep other people from stealing my ideas? By ‘other people,’ these frightened neophytes may mean publishers and agents, but as often they are worried about the integrity of their fellow students. Since nobody dares challenge the lament of the plot-snatch victims, aspiring writers live in fear that their own ideas stand in constant peril. The same is true for claims of idea theft and intellectual property infringement, but the result proves far more pernicious. Kennedy made a pass at my grand-aunt.” As implausible as these tales are in the particular, it is indeed possible that President Kennedy made a pass at somebody’s grand-aunt-so, as a listener, one cannot question the assertion.

These stories belong to a class of ubiquitous claims that connect personal experience to the culture-at-large: “My elementary school teacher was on the short-list to fly aboard the Challenger” or “My accountant uncle did favors for Al Capone” or “John F.

Or a cousin at a holiday dinner will boast that he “shopped around” the first ten pages of his World War II screenplay, which featured several brothers, and Stephen Spielberg later pinched the premise for Saving Private Ryan. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye. A disgruntled, mid-list writer one meets at a conference will reveal that he once sent a manuscript about his disaffected adolescence to Little, Brown and two years later J. Everyone in the writing business long enough will encounter some version of the Great Plot Caper.

Scouting for the Reaper by Jacob M. Appel