Buckle in, we’re doing Romance 101 - Heated Rivalry edition. This is for all the folks (*cough* professional critics) showing their ignorance about what Heated Rivalry is doing. Note: Very little of this is my original thoughts. These things are Known.
Heated Rivalry is a Romance. US publishing nets ~$30 billion/yr & it’s 40% fiction. In fiction, Romance is the highest-grossing genre—$1.44 billion in revenue for May 2022-2023—nearly twice the next bestselling genres. Amazing that critics want to dismiss a billion dollar per year industry.
Romance has genre rules. The primary rule is that the main characters (MCs) must have a Happily Ever After (HEA) or a Happy For Now (HFN). No, you tedious snobs, Romeo & Juliet is not a Romance because they don’t end up together. Sit down, the adults are talking.
Romance is the largest, the most distinct, and the most well-defined genre, with sorted subgenres such as: fiction, historical, fantasy, young adult (YA), contemporary, queer (~10% of the market), mystery, and Christmas. (yes, really) Heated Rivalry slots neatly into the queer subgenre.
Within the Romance genre, sports is another distinct subgenre, and so Heated Rivalry is where the Venn diagram of contemporary, queer, and sports overlaps. Queer hockey fiction is a robust market with many well-known authors. Heated Rivalry is fun, but it’s not special.
Poverty is not sexy. It’s no accident that Ilya and Shane are professional hockey players. Professional sports players are rich, and so they’re good MCs for romance novels, like dukes in the historical category. (What about Cinderella? Precisely, she marries rich—that's sexy.)
Heated Rivalry is not about hockey. The SETTING is hockey. Hockey is popular because it has conventionally attractive men in a stereotypically masculine sport rewarding aggression and physicality. In Heated Rivalry, this is both part of the appeal and part of the plot.*
*nb I do not have the chops to discuss race here, but, uh, it's a major factor
Good romance novels have an interior and exterior plot. The exterior plot is that men's ice hockey is notably homophobic. See also: the Chicago team scandals. If Shane, Ilya and/or Scott Hunter admit they’re queer, the assumption is that they’ll lose their job. This provides tension.
“Oblivious Idiots In Love” is a classic romance novel trope (and fanfic tag). Shane and Ilya are the oblivious idiots who are just fucking around. Ilya is bi, and so can have a girlfriend (or a friend who is a woman) while he’s fucking around in a way that Shane cannot (or will not). More tension.
Heated Rivalry is an intensely queer story because, both for toxic masculinity reasons and historical reasons (AIDS), gay men’s approach to sex is often quite different from the traditional M/F script, and so there is often a lot more fucking and a lot less open emotion. The fucking is the plot.
Romance novels in the AO3 house style (AO3 is where Reid cut her writing teeth) are often character studies, which have a great deal of interiority. Why don’t we see other characters? Because that’s not what we’re doing here, pal. We’re gaining character insight. It's tightly focused on purpose.
“Romance has a liberation wing, wherein protagonists bend the world to find their joy, and a compliance wing, where people bend themselves to find their joy.” Racheline Maltese, 2020 In this interior-centered, romance novel style of eps 1 & 2, Heated Rivalry aims directly at liberation.
Modern Queer Romance’s unofficial motto might as well be carpe joy. We are not here for Ilya and Shane to angst about the fucking part of their relationship. They’re healthy, wealthy, professional athletes who know their own bodies and how to work with other athletes—of course they’re fucking.**
** I just spent two days going around this with a friend, who said, "But Grace, there is so much angst about the fucking in Heated Rivalry!" My friend, who is a generation younger and grew up under Obergefell as the law, couldn’t understand why I was insisting there was no angst about the fucking. Eventually, we clarified that we were talking about two different things. I was talking about the professional critics’ expectations that the story required gay panic, or, barring that, an internal panic about living as sexual being.
My friend was talking about the conflict between internal desires and external, societal expectations.
“They’re just bigots about queer sex,” my friend said. Maybe, some of them, but some of the terrible reviews I read were from critics who were, themselves, openly queer. It’s more than that. IMO, it's bigotry about Romance, as a genre.
Many critics aren’t fluent in Romance, and are still thinking Lawrence of Arabia, while Romance has moved on. Modern queer romance is all about seizing joy despite the world. Ex: Dooryard Books (2025). We’re not agonizing about the decision to be a sexual being anymore. Keep up.
This is not just porn—the sex scenes are structural. Many folks see this as character and/or actors being sexualized, and that’s missing the point. This is art showing us a positive view of warm, emotion-laden sex. We could all be this joyous!
More exterior plot tension: the repeated fucking means that Shane & Ilya can’t brush it off as an “oops!” The point is that they’ve been fucking for years. Imagine if they were rival CEOs who’d been fucking for years? Not great, Bob! We need the repeated scenes.
Romance often appeals to folks who are not straight men (NSM) because the genre is centering someone who is not the person who traditionally holds more social power. Heated Rivalry sets this up as two men, and many readers like it because HR puts the MCs on an even footing in terms of social power.
Repeat: the fucking is the plot. The power imbalance often means that NSM approach fucking with less expectation of pleasure—and in Heated Rivalry, we see Ilya taking care of Shane from the first meeting, when he urges Shane to drink. Shane accepts the care and Ilya is pleased.
Yes, it’s hot, but from that single scene and the alley scene, the knowledgeable reader can infer a great deal. Ilya breaks rules, Shane follows rules. Ilya is prepared and interested in Shane’s pleasure. The fucking reinforces these dynamics; the scenes are structure for character development.
Heated Rivalry, in this subgenre of Romance, takes as a given that queer sex can be joyous and fun, and I suspect that when some critics find the sex scenes "too much," they’re covering some rejection of queer sexuality, or the idea of joyous sex in general, as valid.
Heated Rivalry has Shane and Ilya call each other by their last names not because it’s a “no homo” situation, but because it demonstrates their lack of emotional closeness outside of sex (or "bro hockey"). The moment when two MCs call each other by their first name is a genre classic.
Yes, of course there are other gay men on the hockey team. A) all the queers roll together, duh, that’s how friend groups work, and B) This is a classic method for writing a romance series. It’s a genre staple.
The people who complain about the lack of homoeroticism in sport in Heated Rivalry must have been on their phones while watching. The water bottle scene ALONE is filled with it. This show, and this kind of Romance, reward close attention.
heated rivalry writers, take this burden from me please.
I’m not in the community enough to know where this needs to go but this is a message in a bottle to you hockey yaoi people. I know you, for I have been to hockey yaoi island.
I have no desire to write this fic, these are not my tropes, wheelhouses, nor sandboxes, but I have been watching the markets, and there is a huge appetite for whump, what-if-it-didn’t-work-out-or-worked-out-different-but-even-more-painfully fanfiction in the Heated Rivalry community. I can speculate as to why, but first, I need to know if an idea like this has been done already. If it has, please, please let me know; I need to either see that it has been done to have peace or pass it on like a curse. It just seems...self-evident.
Here’s the elevator pitch:
Andrei (or Alexei, whatever) and his wife die suddenly in an accidnt. Ilya must take custody of his niece, but in order to do so, he must marry a woman (probably Svetlana), and cut all ties with Shane. [[OPTIONAL ENDING: Years pass. Both believe the other has moved on, until the day Shane announces his retirement.]]
SETTING:
It’s not long after Papa Rozanov’s death. Middle of the playoffs, 2017. Before the Scott/Kip kiss, before the cottage. After Shane’s concussion, maybe.
WHAT IF:
Alex-andrei and his wife die (sorry to Alexei's wife; Alexei, you can choke). Maybe in a car wreck, because that’s a classic (sorry Scott Hunter); you can pick your poison.
WHATEVER THE CASE MAY BE, this leaves their daughter, around age 8-10 years old, an orphan.
Orphan. Children. Heartstrings. Men holding children.
You see where I’m going?
Let’s say Alexei's wife’s relatives aren’t in the best shape to take care of said daughter. Plenty of reasons why this might be the case.
EITHER WAY: Ilya is called back to Moscow ONCE AGAIN to take care of things (during the playoffs!)
“Things” in this case include not only a funeral but also an at least somewhat poorly parented child dealing with unimaginable loss at a young age—
—a niece, who, in the canon of the show, Ilya at least likes, if not loves, and would like to provide for.
Ilya is 26, obscenely wealthy, sensitive, protective, repressed, prone to self-martyrdom, easily manipulated, and convinced he does not deserve love or to be happy on his own terms.
Please take this burden from me, for I have no desire to write this canon divergent, long separation, whump-with-a-happy-ending kid!fic myself. I have never met a child (I will read it though.)
But let’s continue. Given the above, either:
Ilya moves back to Russia, joins the Russian league, gains custody with or without marriage-of-appearances, OR:
Feeling the burden of this responsibility, but with no prospects in Russia equal to those he has in the States, Ilya must devise a way to gain custody of said Unnamed Orphaned Niece, AND legally take said U.O.N. out of Russia (especially difficult to justify if she has any other living relatives), AND bring them BOTH into the United States, ideally with a path to citizenship…
THEREFORE: Ilya is forced to publicly comport himself according to both the Russian courts’ (and the American immigration system’s) standards of heteronormative decency… (in 2017)...
…necessitating (given my basic knowledge of naturalization laws in the US) around 3-5 years of “marriage” / cohabitation for citizenship. With a woman.
Let’s reach for the obvious answer here and say Svetlana steps up. At immense personal cost/sacrifice, for both of them.
And where does this leave Shane? Sveta? Ilya? Unnamed Niece?
Total mutual devastation for Ilya and Shane both, of course. Imagine the phone call--first when Ilya leaves for Moscow (again), then when he says he's marrying Svetlana.
"Do you love her?" "Yes. She has known me since I was a child. I can’t…I can't imagine anyone else doing this with me." "Are you…in love with her?" "It doesn't matter." "Stop saying that. You always say that."
Etc. Etc.
Imagine the fight to hang on, and both Ilya and Shane’s painful reconciliation with a reality that doesn’t include what they both know they want. Do they admit how they feel before they give up, or hold it inside?
Shane and Ilya part. It’s awful.
Maybe they still play against each other, at first, or maybe Ilya takes the next season off to help Unnamed Niece adjust. Ilya makes a show of being with Svetlana in public (for immigration reasons), and Shane starts to doubt if what they had was real.
Maybe Shane comes out on his own, a few years after he and Ilya decide to part; maybe dates men in public.
A pandemic happens, lest we forget. No hockey. Ilya keeping it together, getting out of bed, barely, for the sake of Unnamed Niece.
Let’s hear from Svetlana, too;. At some point, Svetlana has to decide whether or not she can still be the one to comfort Ilya, given all she’s had to compromise in her own life. Does she want to pretend to be a wife, a step-aunt-mother? How does she maintain the independence she’s cultivated for herself? (Also imagine if mid-pandemic is when Ilya and Svetlana can start separating--she's like, hooray, welcome to my divorce theory slut era, here in quarantine with my bisexual heartbroken husband and green card niece).
Unnamed Niece! Who is she? How does she adapt to this life far from home, learning a different language, in a reality she never imagined? How does Ilya, as she grows, maybe change uneasily from the “fun uncle” into something else? In my head, Ilya’s the Unnamed Niece’s protector, at first, but they struggle as she grows up—he’s trying to be the father he never had, the one he thinks she needs; she’s trying to figure out who she is, given all she's lost and gained. Svetlana, maybe, helps, as she gets older, to navigate how she relates (or doesn’t) to femininity, privilege.
Maybe it’s Ilya who retires early, young, to be with Unnamed Niece more—starts coaching at high schools, then colleges, gains a reputation as unconventional but beloved mentor, good with rookies--"The Russian" all American prospects want to train with.
Shane keeps playing; they say he’ll never stop.
Milk that as you will, or simply summarize the details. All this and more can be covered in some flashbacks to the bright spots and dark spots in Ilya, Svetlana and Unnamed Niece’s lives as she grows up, alternating with glimpses into Shane’s life, on his separate path, himself beloved, lonely, and longing, just as Ilya is.
Eventually we arrive at (if you want a happy ending) the Necessary Reunion.
My vote is the longer the separation the better; set it in the future—maybe things are better in 2030-something!
Unnamed Niece is grown, almost ready to go out on her own. Svetlana and Ilya quietly divorced, after years of him looking over his shoulder, waiting to be caught out. (Does their friendship survive, get stronger, or suffer, after all of that? Are they truly family, now?) Shane doesn’t even know, maybe, that Ilya and Svetlana are not still together.
The occasion for the reunion: finally, Shane Hollander is going to retire. Jersey in the rafters. Invitations issued far and wide, even to Rozanov, everyone from his same rookie year.
And then they meet. Wary of each other. Not sure who it matters to any more, how much it mattered to whom. Accidental hurt feelings.
An apology. Getting to know each other again. A long night, accidentally, just talking. Teasing. Then texting. A plan to meet up—in public, this time. An almost-kiss. Miscommunication. So damaged on both sides, believing the other moved on without them.
Unnamed Niece gets involved, charmingly. Svetlana tells her not to bother, its inevitable, they'll always find each other.
Backing off, both hurt. A confrontation. Then, kissing. Muah muah muah full sex.
You know. Something like that.
My only horse in this race is that Shane and Ilya get to fall in love again in their mid to late-30s. That’s all I want.
Phew. Glad that's off my chest, because I have so much other yearning and Japanese BL to catch up on.
fiction got off soooo lucky with dreams and hallucinations. imagine if the human brain didn't come with a built-in path to surreal imagery that could perfectly represent abstract themes and emotional truths through metaphor. we'd be so fucked man
To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.
“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?
Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.
But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
How to Write a Retelling (+Copyright & Public Domain)
A retelling is when a writer takes a well-known story and writes a new version of it. There have been many different types of retellings: classic novels that are in the public domain (meaning the original copyright has expired) like Pride and Prejudice or Alice in Wonderland, fairy tales like Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood, legends like Robin Hood, or characters and stories from folklore and myth such as Korean folklore or Greek mythology.
Here is a list of resources for how to write a retelling for anyone interested in writing their own version of a classic story, fairy tale, folktale, or myth.
Retellings: Why Do It? Helpful suggestions and tips for how to start writing a retelling.
Criteria for a Good Retelling Helpful suggestions and advice for how to write a retelling.
What Keeps a Retelling True? Explains the importance of having respect for and knowledge of the original source material when writing a retelling.
How to Steal a Plot for Your Book (And Get Away with It) Provides suggestions and tips for how to take plots and characters from other stories and rewrite them into something new (like a retelling). Note: This article does not mention the important issue of copyright.
How Do I Make This Different? Offers advice and suggestions for how to take inspiration from well-known stories and use that to make your own original story. This post is geared towards taking inspiration from copyrighted works and turning those ideas into a new original story, but it can be applied to retellings as well. Note: Uses the Harry Potter series as an example.
Taking Inspiration from Another Story’s Premise Provides advice for what to do when you want to write a story with a similar plot of a copyrighted work, but without actually copying or plagiarizing the original work. However, the advice given can also apply to writing retellings.
Beta Reader Sees Similarity with Existing Character Provides advice for what to do when the characters or plot in your original story appear similar to those in a copyrighted work, but it can apply to writing retellings as well. Note: Uses the Harry Potter series as an example.
Story Diversifier Chart by WQA A blog post that contains a link to a free downloadable chart that can be used to keep track of and compare the differences and similarities between your story and the original work that you’re taking inspiration from.
Note: It is important to remember that a published retelling can only be rewritten from a story that is not under copyright. This is why retellings are generally rewritten from works that are in the public domain (i.e., the original book’s copyright is expired, or there is no copyright, such as with a legend or myth that has been passed down over generations).
If someone takes the exact characters or fictional world from a novel that is protected by copyright and tries to publish their version of it, then that is considered plagiarism and could result in a lawsuit. So if you’re thinking about writing a retelling, it’s very important to check whether the original work (or source material) is currently under copyright or if it’s in the public domain (i.e., no longer under copyright).
The rules for copyright and public domain use can be complicated, so when trying to figure out if a novel or other work is in the public domain or not, it’s important to do your own research.
For example: The Wicked series by Gregory Maguire is based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. While The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is in the public domain, Wicked is copyrighted (not only the films, but the books as well). So while you can write a retelling based on Dorothy, or the Wicked Witch, or the Scarecrow from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, you cannot legally publish your own story about Maguire’s characters Elphaba or Fiyero or his particular version of Glinda, or anything specific from his book’s world, like Shiz University.
(If you want to write a story using the characters or worlds from a copyrighted work, then that’s fanfiction, which is an entirely different category. Fanfiction can be freely shared and published online, as long as you don’t profit from it. But that’s another issue that can get complicated.)
I’m including some other resources that go beyond writing retellings, in case anyone is interested. These resources focus on copyright, plagiarism, and what to do if you’re taking inspiration from copyrighted works when writing your own original stories.
For more information:
Copyright and Intellectual Property Toolkit An online guide with resources and information on issues regarding copyright, including things like fair use and the public domain. The link will take you to the “General Copyright FAQ” section, but the page’s sidebar has tabs linking to other topics as well. This section explains what is and what is not protected by copyright, and it provides information on fair use.
Copyright and Intellectual Property Toolkit (2) Same online guide as above, only this link will take you to the section with information on the public domain. Provides a list of links for finding works in the public domain.
Fair Use in Novels Provides a basic explanation for what can and cannot be used regarding copyrighted material (such as titles, names of characters, quotes, and song lyrics). Explains what “public domain” means.
Can I Use Someone Else’s Characters in My New Original Story? Explains the difference of using characters from public domain works and characters from copyrighted works.
The Difference Between Taking Inspiration and Plagiarizing A short post that explains the difference between taking inspiration and plagiarizing. Note: Uses the Harry Potter series as an example.
Copyright, Similarities, and Plagiarism A post that briefly explains copyright and trademark. Includes a list of other resources on copyright, writing stories with similarities to copyrighted works, and how to write your own original work.
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I’m a writer, poet, and editor. I share writing resources that I’ve collected over the years and found helpful for my own writing. If you like my blog, follow me for more resources! ♡
[“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.”]
every nolan film is about time. it winds its way through his filmography; it is fractured in memento, distorted in inception, expanded in interstellar, reversed in tenet.
every hopper painting is about stillness. it is found in every brushstroke; at dusk in automat, at dawn in morning sun, at noon in office in a small city, at night in nighthawks.
i have a friend who orbits ideas of power, another who delights in the prosaic and the plain. one weaves around systems and structures, another returns always to wonder at the sea.
there are other elements of course - our lives cannot be measured by single concepts no matter how large they may be - but time and again i think we return to the things that fascinate, the things that intrigue, the things we cannot quite tear ourselves away from. the themes of our lives.
I read Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees once years ago and have been carrying this idea she has about writers, form, and subject/themes around in my head ever since (bolding mine):
Finding your form is like finding a mate. You really have to search, and you can’t compromise—unless you can compromise, in which case your misery will be of a different variety. But just as there are probably only one or two people to whom you could commit yourself, there are probably only a few things you can write about, and only one genre, or maybe two, in which you might excel. It’s no coincidence that most authors’ bodies of work hover over two or three basic themes or take a single basic shape. Think of the novels of Trollope, Austen, Dickens, or Hardy; think of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. They each revisited the same themes, settings, and conflicts over the course of their writing lives. The James Joyces of the world, those who can move from short story to novel to epic, are rare, but then again, few writers master each form the first time out of the gate.
Even though most writers have a limited literary arsenal, readers find infinite pleasure in watching those gestures change and deepen over time. But if you aren’t yet sure what your themes are or what category you should be writing in, you need to take a full accounting of all the reading and all thewriting you have ever done or wanted to do. If you are one of the many people who dream of writing but have never successfully finished or, perhaps, even started a piece, I suggest you compile a list of everything you’ve read over the past six months or year and try to determine if there is a pattern or common denominator. If you read only literary novels, that should tell you something. If you’ve always kept a diary noting the natural world in all its variety, you might want to try writing nature essays.
It never fails to surprise me, in conversations with writers who seek my advice as to what they should write, how many fail to see before their very eyes the hay that might be gold. Instead of honoring the subjects and forms that invade their dreams and diaries, they concoct some ideas about what’s selling or what agents and editors are looking for as they try to fit their odd-shaped pegs into someone else’s hole. There is nothing more refreshing for an editor than to meet a writer or read a query letter that takes him completely by surprise, that brings him into a world he didn’t know existed or awakens him to a notion that had been there all along but that he had nevermuch noticed.
Some of the most striking and successful books in recent history were clearly born of a writer’s obsession and complete disregard for what, supposedly, sells. Few editors would have gone for a queer book about a little-known murder in Savannah that took its sweet time describing every other quirkof the city and its inhabitants before addressing the crime.Whatever John Berendt was thinking when he set out to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it couldn’t have been the bestseller list, because almost anyone in the publishing industry would have told him that nobody would care about the story of a gay antiques dealer who languished in jail after shooting a cheap hustler. The book does, however, draw on what most certainly are Berendt’s strengths as a reporter, as a travel writer, and as a southerner with a gothic sensibility and taste for the macabre. Clearly, he was born to write this book, and he worked through whatever ambivalence and uncertainty he might have felt within himself or encountered from others.
Most writers have very little choice in what they write about. Think of any writer’s body of work, and you will see the thematic pattern incorporating voice, structure, and intent. What is in evidence over and over is a certain set of obsessions, a certain vocabulary, a way of approaching the page. The person who can’t focus is not without his own obsessions, vocabulary, and approach. However, either he can’t find his form or he can’t apply the necessary discipline that ultimately separates the published from the unpublished.
i say this in all seriousness, a great way to resist the broad cultural shift of devaluing curiosity and critical thinking is to play my favorite game, Hey What Is That Thing
you play it while walking around with friends and if you see something and don't know what it is or wonder why its there, you stop and point and say Hey What Is That Thing. and everyone speculates about it. googling it is allowed but preferably after spending several minutes guessing or asking a passerby about it
weird structures, ambiguous signs, unfamiliar car modifications, anything that you can't immediately understand its function. eight times out of ten, someone in the group actually knows, and now you know!
a few examples from me and my friends the past few weeks: "why is there a piece of plywood sticking out of that pond in a way that looks intentional?" (its a ramp so squirrels that fall in to the pond can climb out) • "my boss keeps insisting i take a vacation of nine days or more, thats so specific" (you work at a bank, banks make employees take vacation in long chunks so if youre stealing or committing fraud, itll be more obvious) • "why does this brick wall have random wooden blocks in it" (theres actually several reasons why this could be but we asked and it was so you could nail stuff to the wall) • "most of these old factories we drive past have tinted windows, was that just for style?" (fun fact the factory owners realized that blue light keeps people awake, much like screen light does now, so they tinted the windows blue to keep workers alert and make them work longer hours)
been playing this game for a long time and ive learned (and taught) a fuckton about zoning laws, local history, utilities (did you know you can just go to your local water treatment plant and ask for a tour and if they have a spare intern theyll just give you a tour!!!) and a whole lot of fun trivia. and now suddenly you're paying more attention when youre walking around, thinking about the reasons behind every design choice in the place you live that used to just be background noise. and it fuckin rules.
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