Somebody else already wrote it: What now?

The book I was writing has just been published… by somebody else.

Finding out that an idea you’ve just come up with has already been done can be disappointing. It happens to every writer, and it’s always a let down. That “absolutely unique” plot point you were so excited over is actually a genre cliche. The twist in your psychological thriller has already been used by Stephen King — twice. Your mom tilts her head to the side as you explain your new story idea and asks, “Isn’t that just like that one Tom Cruise movie?” We’ve all been there. But it really stings when you’re already working on a project and someone gets it done before you.

“Babe, someone already wrote our story. It’s going to be a movie, I just saw the trailer and it’s exactly the same as what we wrote.”

Just under three years ago when my partner Rhys Lemoine and I had just started seeing each other, we had the brilliant idea of collaborating on a novel together. We were both writers; I had just published my second YA book, and he wrote non-fiction for a rewilding blog. We both loved science fiction and were in that honeymoon phase in our relationship where we were passing our favourite books back and forth to get a better feel for each other. He lent me Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, and I knew I was in love.

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash

We knew straight away that we wanted to write a book about Neanderthals. I had read and loved Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal, made it through Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (one of Rhys’s favourites), marveled at Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly Little Boy, and dug into articles and non-fiction books about Neanderthals in preparation for writing Adam From Yesterday, the scientifically-accurate, feel-good Neanderthal book my partner and I both craved — and had decided to write together.

We wrote character sheets and scourged stock images for the faces of our characters; made lists of names and chapter titles; plotted big twists and small moments of emotional gravity; sketched out scenes; made a Padlet board of photos and ideas and links to articles. Our priorities were different. Rhys was concerned about the biological…