The Cycle

I had a story written, well, written in my mind.  I hadn’t actually put pen to paper or typed anything into a Word document, but in my head I knew what I wanted the story to be.  I even had the ending, which in reality was the impetus for wanting to write it in the first place.  I knew where I was going to start, where I wanted to go, and how I was going to get there.  Those are things that really help when you are trying to write a story.  Most people don’t like reading articles which are essentially randomly selected words vomited on a page.

The final week of December I saw a web comic, probably shared on Reddit, which was similar to what I wanted to write.  It was clever and funny.  Luckily, the ending was not what I wanted to write, I was taking the story in a different direction, so I still felt that I could write my story and not be labeled as copycat.  Then a couple of days later I saw another web comic, this time linked on Boing Boing, which again was a similar story to what I wanted to write.   Its point was different from the one I wanted to make, and that of the other web comic, but now I’m balking at the idea of posting my story.  Two different web comics published comics based on the same subject within the span of a week.  Now, if I publish my story, I’d look like someone who copies whatever everyone else happens to be doing right now.

I’m not sure how common it is among web comics to mine other comics for ideas, but I certainly see it on blogs and on other media outlets that aren’t just reporting news.  When people run low on ideas you tend to see similar articles posted in many places, whether it is, “top 10 things to know about the introvert in your life,” or the more recent, “the Mayan calendar does/does not predict the end of the world in December.”  Note: this is more specific than the general format of, “what you need to know about blank,” or, “the top ten blanks about blank,” blog posts you see.  In these cases, the specific subject matter is repeated.

Of course, spreading these stories over the web also has its own cycle.  Generally, I’ll see an article first on one of the link aggregator sites.  Over the next two days the same link makes the rounds of Reddit, Digg, Fark, Boing Boing; whichever site was not the first to link to the original story.  Finally the story hits the bizarre news slot of a more mainstream site like Yahoo.  At this point, the story starts getting posted by people on social media sites.  Three to five days after I’ve read an article I’ll have several different friends post links to the story, or a similar one, on their Facebook feed.  Finally, a week after first seeing the story, my father will email me a link to it or the whole article as a PDF.

When you consider the fact that similar stories are posted on multiple sites over the course of a few days, it’s no wonder that essentially the same story gets posted on Fark two or three days straight.  This extended seeding spreads out the time it takes for a story to circulate the net, sometimes smearing it across a week-and-a-half.

But enough with the tangent about story circulation.  Back to the one I wanted to write.

Notice, I’ve been careful not to offer the specific theme of the story or to name either of the web comics with whom I share the story.  The reason is because I’m going to publish my story anyway, whenever I get around to actually writing it, and you’ll never have any idea which one it actually is.  From here on out, when you read something I posted that sounds familiar, you’ll be asking yourself, “is this story something Greg just copied from another post I recently read or is this the one he warned me about in that old blog post?”  You’ll never know.

Advantage: me.