When it comes to writing, do you beg, borrow or steal?
Hang on, you say, none of those sound a good idea. Isn’t that plagiarism, or a crime, or something very bad that would end a career or put you in gaol?
Not so, I cry. In fact, it’s exactly what you have to do. You don’t have a choice. What matters is where you are begging, borrowing and stealing from. It’s how minds and imaginations work.
Let’s get some things out of the way. I’m not advising you to steal someone else’s copyrighted material. Hands off. Uh-uh. No way. And that goes for you too, AI generated material ripping off work others have done! If human writers get prosecuted for it, so should you (meaning the companies making money out of you).
Let’s get to the exciting stuff of what we can do legitimately with beg, borrow or steal.
Begging
Now begging seems to me to suggest you feel empty and need your begging bowl of ideas filled. It is also called writer’s block. This is where you shouldn’t sit on the pavement looking mournfully into your empty cache of ideas but you need to go out and about shaking it optimistically that someone or something will drop in a few coins.
I’ll give an example from my own writing. I’ve written a children’s series imagining Jane Austen as a young detective. As a quirky title pattern, I’d started them alphabetically - The Abbey Mystery, The Burglar’s Ball… We reached ‘C’ and my bowl was empty. My husband and I took our dogs on a walk in Oxford and I was saying how I knew the subject would be a word beginning with c but I had no idea what. We began to throw out late 18th century words - colonel, coachman, candle - and then he drew my attention to where we were: on the Oxford Canal towpath, a canal that was completed in 1790 and was part of the canal mania of the era (fortunes won and lost).
The begging bowl was filled up by dog walk happenstance.
You can buy the canal story here.
Borrowing
Borrowing is bad for copyrighted material but entirely fine for things outside of it. You can borrow the story of Troy, or Hamlet, or Oliver Twist and reimagine it. I love doing this. I’ve borrowed fictional characters, such as King Arthur and Merlin, as well as historical ones, such as Sheridan, William Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. My own rule with real historical characters is to leave them unharmed. Unless I’m writing an alternative fantasy history where I’m purposely departing from our world, I borrow them like a library book and return them to the lending library of real history unaffected by the end of my tale.
In my next adult novel (out October 24th), called The Elgin Conspiracy, I’ve borrowed Lord Elgin and Lord Byron from history and had fun with them. Byron is already well known but my characters nibble away at a part of his life and show you what he was up to in 1812. Lord Elgin is even more exciting to borrow because he is more of a blank slate as far as the reader is concerned. Most people, if they know him, are only aware of his association with the Parthenon marbles and the ongoing controversy about them. What they don’t know is the stuff I’m able to use as part of my plot - his imprisonment in France, his epic divorce, his bitter feud with his ex-wife. I borrow him for my murder-mystery plot and put him back on his historical track by the end.
(You can pre-order the book here - thanks for your support if you do so).
Stealing
Thou shalt not steal - unless you are very clever about it. Another way of thinking about it is reinterpreting someone else’s idea for your own purposes. You have to move so many steps away from the original context so that the debt becomes an influence rather than plagiarism or a slavish copying.
Shakespeare famously ‘stole’ most of his plots from his sources but did such wonderful things to them that we’d all beg him to steal from us if he were still around.
Here’s another example. Think of your favourite moment in your favourite novel. What at essence is it that you like about what the writer has done here? Is it Dickens’ Oliver Twist daring to ask for more, for example? It is the iconic moment from the book, film, musical, so there’s something here that we all love. What we like here for the beginning of a story is that an underdog of a character shows himself to be courageous (or foolish) enough to go through with a childish game of dare. We’re also aware of the cataclysmic events that the one step out of the crowd unleashes which sees him suffer more and more until he reaches his happy ending.
If you were going to steal this, you wouldn’t copy it, but you might use the essence of that small person stepping up and suffering the consequences.
That’s the way to steal as a writer - see a good idea and work out what it means when stripped to its bare bones for you, then articulate it again in another context.
Happy stealing!
The Persephone Code is on deal this month here.