New Ideas or "Lurking" Plagiarism; Maybe A Hidden Danger for Writers?

What are the odds⎯if you have devoted a major portion of your life to reading novels and writing creatively⎯that in pursuit of the latter, you will sooner or later cross the line that separates the realm of original thinking from what some might call plagiarism? I’m not speaking of the conscious act of copying word-for-word the language from another author, but something subtler

As a reader, I’ve regularly devoured novels for more than sixty years. I’ve cobbled words together creatively for the last decade. This past summer, I began to reread novels published and read long before the idea to try my hand at writing creatively was born. One scene, in a novel published and read some fourteen years ago, was so close to what I had written only four years that I stopped reading and began to ask a question.

How was it possible that two pieces of writing, separated by nearly a decade, could be so similar as to the situation in which the main character finds himself, how he feels about the situation, and the physical actions he takes to alleviate his feelings? My thought, after some consideration, is that the separation may not be as wide as it appears.

Those who conduct research on human memory agree that every event experienced since birth is stored in the brain’s memory cells. These stored memories are used as a reference (a process called prior probability) to identify new events, and how to react to them as they occur.

The experts have not suggested that every word of every novel read is stored in the brain’s memory cells. However, it is not uncommon to start reading a novel with the assumption that it is a “new” read. At some point, a particular scene brings the realization that the book has been read at some time in the past. But nothing up to the point of realization has been remembered, and nothing that follows can be recalled.

So is it possible for the process to work in reverse? Could an author’s creative effort to describe a moment in his or her protagonist’s life be influenced subconsciously? Could what the author considers original thinking be, without realizing it, only new words to describe a scene from another novel, read and then filed away in the brain’s memory cells?