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Has anyone ever had this problem, creatively?

You come up with an idea, or get inspired by something and then take it to the next logical step, and you think to yourself "This idea makes for the perfect story/character/villain/whatever" and things are hunkydory.

Then, through what amounts to as a random luck, you happen across a book written by someone you've never met, already published, who's premise has a very similar idea to your own. I'm not saying identical, I'm saying similar.

As writers, has anyone been disheartened by this? And if you have, what did you do? Abandoned the idea? Changed it? Kept it the same? Any thoughts on this subject would be welcome.

(I also don't know if this is the right forum, but it seems to fit. If a mod feels a need to shift the thread, then so be it )

[EDIT] I should add, the reason I find it a "annoying problem" because it enters the terrain of originality. My idea is similar to this guy's, not identical, so perhaps there's little reason to get disheartened. I don't know, has anyone encountered this problem before?

I have a little bit (I don't have much of a past with freelance writing). What ended up happening in my case is that, although the basic idea was sort of similar, when I actually sat down to write my story, it took turns away from the other person's story and became more mine the more I wrote.

I doubt that'll help, but it's all I got. Sorry.

Yeah, it's happened to me several times, and it always pisses me off.

I usually put it on the back burner and let the idea marinate...as it develops, it usually wanders far enough away not to be a problem.

Yup, has happened, and certainly it will happen in the future.

I usually change "slightly" a few details, but since I have my own ideas on where the story goes, and what I want to do with the character/idea/whatever, the similarities develop and morph with time, hopefully into something with enough disimilarities not to become pure plagiarism.

Yes.
Two examples ( among other instances ) :

* using a VR/AR system to pilot starships, allowing for accelerated thought ( seen in The Rise of Endymion on Pax Archangels ).

* the concept of storing the personality/memory of the dead within an active computer realm, granting the ability to climb the scale of sophonce ( seen in the Eon/Eternity/Legacy trilogy by Greg Bear ).

Mostly though, it happens long after I finished or gave up the story. It's a bit annoying but I get over with it pretty quickly ( actually if the book is good I tend to think something in the style of "Well if he wrote good shit and I had a similar idea, perhaps I'll end up writing good shit as well" ).

I'm not that afraid to borrow from other sci-fi writers if I'm only writing a story for entertainment - but I nonetheless plan to throw most of my longer stories through a series of revisions in order to give them their own feel.

I had the exact same thing happen to me this year, not with a fanfic though.

I'm quite into my film making, and January of this year my friends and I spent about 9 days straight making this funky little short film. Its set in the style of the old Sci-Fi shows and comics like Buck Rodgers. It's called "Take Back The Planet!" right. So anyway, after like 6 months since we filmed it, we have almost finished all the special effects and post production on it. (Hey, we've been busy studying alright ...)

I was browsing the web the other day, and I come across "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow!". It is essentially a big screen version of our film, but we had no idea it was in production, likewise they probably wouldn't care about our short. Regardless, we are nearly ready to release our short and everyone will be like "Oh hey, these guys made a crap Sky Captain fan film"