How What You Read Effects What You Write

[Tessar]

Lately I’ve noticed that a lot of my ideas spring from various degrees of spin-offs from things I’ve read before, or ideas that’ve been put forth in other novels. Some times it’s things like elves (of course most fantasy stories involve elves), or some times its things like a magic ‘system’ that is very loosely based on the Sword of Truth set up that I saw in the first book.

Do you guys find yourself using other author’s ideas, even if very indirectly, most of the time?

Now I know that a good deal of it is because after 2000+ years of plot lines, there generally aren’t too many new ideas bouncing around the world, but what I mean is do you use ideas that just popped into your head without any connection to anything else, or do you copy and edit most of the time?

Like I said before, a lot of my stuff is copy and edit, but in some cases I’ll have ideas which, although I’m sure have been used before, I haven’t seen in any book I’ve read.